


Rest and be thankful

by Ione



Category: The People - Zenna Henderson, The Sherwood Ring - Elizabeth Marie Pope
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-30
Updated: 2012-11-30
Packaged: 2017-11-19 22:48:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/578470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ione/pseuds/Ione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perdita follows a fifty year old revenant to Rest-and-be-thankful, to discover a mystery, a circle, and romance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rest and be thankful

**Author's Note:**

  * For [riverlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/riverlight/gifts).



The only other person in the train car was a girl who looked about twenty, a few years younger than me.

 Her thin shoulders hunched, her head bowed, dark hair that had been badly cut at least a year ago hanging in hanks to partition her face. But they didn’t quite hide a pensive profile, and eyes so light they looked gray, dramatically contrasting with dark brows winged less by art than by nature.

 She gazed out the window at the mist-obscured rolling scenery. Gradually details resolved: clutched against her she carried a battered suitcase, not a rolling bag; her ugly, rusty-black tweed coat looked like it had been out of fashion for at least half a century; old loafers and stockings that looked hand-knit.

 Oh. One of _those_.

 I couldn’t remember ever seeing a revenant while in transit. But I’d learned long ago they showed up whenever or wherever they wanted, no rhyme or reason.

 I turned my attention back to the scenery. The train had left the Hudson behind, nosing its way among a succession of gentle hills. Modernity had not taken over the countryside, a contrast to the high-voltage speed of New York City; my eye was drawn to the occasional farmhouses patch-worked with old fences, and shadowy stands of forest here and there.

 Gradually a heavy mist poured softly over the hills, diffusing upward to swallow the sunlight and obscure the scenery, accentuating the curious timelessness.

 _Follow your dreams and you shall find happiness. There is nothing stronger than love. Let the Presence be your guide_.  My beloved _abuela_ , for whom I’d been named, had said those things, but so far, if there was any truth in any of it, it seemed to work for other people.

 The fog rendering the world indistinct seemed emblematic of my life, which seemed to exist on the edges of others’ lives in more ways than one. I was too _gringo_ for my Gutierrez side of the family, and my father hadn’t seemed to have any family—he’d been a wanderer whom my mother had tried to pin down. Big mistake. Though I think she’d always suspected she wouldn’t be able to, for she’d not only kept her name when they married, she’d written hers instead of his on my birth certificate.

 Did he want that? All I know is, after she told him “If you walk out that door again, never come back,” he walked. And never came back. But wherever he was in the world, he always managed to call me every year on my birthday, and we’d pick right up where we’d left off the last time, talking until Mom chased me off the phone. 

 That ended the year _Abuelita_ passed. My birthday came and went with no phone call. A few months later a small box with an official-looking letter arrived, stating that he’d died serving his country.

What did that really _mean_ , ‘serving his country?’ No answer, of course. But at least there were a couple of concrete things: a modest life insurance policy made out in my name, and a very old-fashioned pocket watch inscribed in elaborate script with the letters REG; one of my earliest memories was sitting on his knee with the watch in my hands as I tried to puzzle out the letters.

 He’d departed before I got old enough to ask about the anomaly, as his name was Grant Richards. After he left I forgot about the watch until it fell out of the package into my lap.

When showed the things to my mother, I asked about the initials. “Who was Reg?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she retorted in the special tone of bitterness that accompanied certain subjects, one of which was my dad. “He always had that thing, at least he did when I first met him. He probably stole it.”

I’d tried Googling him, to discover precisely nothing. It was as if my dad had wandered into our lives and out again without leaving a trace—except for the watch, and me. I finally figured Dad had been a spy or something in the twilight world of diplomacy; I used the money to go to college, and the watch went with me when I finally left home for good.

 There were two other things I seemed to have inherited from him: eyes of an indeterminate dark shade, and ending up with a so-called career that was liminal by its very nature.

What else can do you when time serves everyone else as a boundary, but not you? I made a precarious living as a re-enactment performer. It made perfect sense for someone who kept seeing glimpses of how people once lived their lives.

So here I was on this train nosing its way into the heartland of New York State, chasing rumor of another possible gig, alone except for a ghost.

The fog inexorably thickened. The way my thoughts were tending, I hoped it wasn’t some kind of sign, an idea that made me laugh at myself. _Listen for the Signs_ , my grandmother had said. _I live in hope they are not gone, along with my mother’s People, who were born on a far star, and came here when their Home exploded._

That was another of the subjects that earned Mom’s special sarcasm. If you wanted to drive her wild, mention aliens. Though _Abuelita_ had married into the Gutierrez family, Mom firmly regarded her dark-haired mother as fully Hispanic as Grandfather Gutierrez, who had died in the Vietnam war. One of my earliest memories was waking up in a fright with Mom yelling at _Abuelita_ to stop talking about her imaginary People, did she want her granddaughter to grow up crazy, too?

 All I knew was, I never saw any aliens.

 But I did see ghosts.

 I learned never to talk about what I saw unless _Abuelita_ and I were alone—which wasn’t all that often, as she’d been really popular in our little Arizona town. Everyone had loved her, but then she’d loved everyone. After _Abuelita_ died, all the hope and love in the world seemed to go with her.

 I leaned my head against the window, my breath in the humid, stale air fogging up the window next to my cheek. New York City had turned out to be only a haven if you had money. If you were like me — with $37.52 in your pocket, and all your worldly belongings in your old high school backpack — New York City was pretty blunt with its hints: _maximum occupation. Go away_.

 But though the city didn’t seem to want me, individuals had been decent—fellow hopeful actors, whiling away the long hours in dismal waiting rooms by passing rumors back and forth of possible work.

  _Re-enactment? Hey, there’s a lot going on in Massachusetts. Have you tried there?_ And, yesterday, _If you don’t mind mid-state New York, a friend of mine going to some local college said they’re hiring for a weekend gig over July Fourth weekend_. _It’s somewhere in Orange County—all I know is, you take the train up to West Point, then west to Goshen. It’s somewhere beyond that—it’s all small towns there—anyone should be able to tell you._

Thirty-seven dollars was not enough to get a night even in the worst fleabag. A night spent sitting in Grand Central, trying to stay awake so I didn’t get chased out as a homeless, had inspired me to go for the gig, fuzzy as that was on exact location.  My thirty-seven dollars had barely covered a ticket, with a few bucks left over for a sandwich and a bottle of water.

 The train jerk to a stop. To my surprise, the revenant was still there. Usually I only saw them once.

But it was definitely the same girl, talking to a stout little train conductor with an old-fashioned pillbox hat on his white hair, who pointed at the window. Was that the murmur of voices? No, couldn’t be. I’d never heard any speech from revenants, it had to be train noise.

 I wondered what they saw — if the countryside was as foggy for them as it was for me. It would certainly explain the quiet resignation in her thin face as she returned to her bench and sat down.

 I had another impulse. I refused to think of it as a Sign, because _Abuelita_ ’s Signs were as amorphous as her Presence, that is, not just her presence but the, oh, sense of the supernatural that she had called _The Presence_. Mom had loathed that, too. _The only thing you can believe in is cash in hand. And that it takes hard work to put it there_.

 Well, one thing _I_ was sure of. There was no ghostly glowing signpost saying _Perdita Gutierrez, This Is Your Destiny_ —but hey, why not follow that revenant until she vanished? She at least seemed to know where she was going; I was so sleep-deprived that actually made sense.

 She got up to stand at the door as the train slowed. I peered out into the gloom, and barely made out a sign: NEW JERUSALEM.

 With a sort of internal shrug, I picked up my backpack and headed for the door. When I stepped off the train, I caught sight of my revenant looking around dismally, her battered suitcase at her feet.

 “There’s another one,” someone said behind me.

 “Can’t be,” a second female said. “Where’s her garb? Stuffed in that ready backpack?”

 The revenant had faded into the fog. I whirled around. The two girls who had just stepped out of the train car behind mine were both looking right at _me_.

I stared back, trying to wrench my tired mind into the present. They seemed to be college age, one blonde straight out of Central Casting for the perky cheerleader, the other supermodel tall and dark-haired. She looked bored.

Blondie turned her megawatt smile onto me. “You here for the July Fourth gig, too?”

  _It’s_ not _a sign_ , I thought. All my life, revenants had flickered in and out of existence without the slightest connection to me. Still, the thought that my journey might be done was reassuring. I smiled back. “Yep.” And looked at their garment bags. “Is this strictly a bring-your-own-costume thing?”

 Blondie said, “Oh, they’ve got stuff, I’m pretty sure. But we were hoping to get chosen for a _good_ role.”

 The other girl had been looking around. “They said we’d be met.” She sounded doubtful.

 Blondie said with the confidence of one who believes she has the inside line of communication, “Of course they sent Queen Bess for us.” She sighed, hefting her garment bag, which looked heavy. “Maybe the train came in early?”

 “Well, since the parking lot is totally empty, let’s take a look on the other side of the station,” Supermodel suggested. She, too, was loaded down with stuff.

“Want a hand carrying anything?” I asked, joining them.

 They each gratefully relinquished something, Blondie a bulging workout bag, and Supermodel a hefty makeup case. I wondered what kind of role they were hoping to get.

 The three of us made our way to the other side of the little station, which looked like it had been last modernized around World War I. We found no bus, shuttle, or ancient queen, but what waited was almost as good: a hay wagon, with a bunch of people sitting in the back. One girl had bright blue hair.

 Blondie grinned. “The wagon! How cool is that?”

 Supermodel sighed as we started across the parking lot. One of the guys at the back of the wagon caught sight of us. “Mad! We had a bet going whether you’d show or not.”

 Inside of a minute the three of us had squeezed into the wagon with everybody else and their jumble of luggage. The driver, a broad, muscular guy with curly dark hair, glanced around, looked back at us, and grinned. “I guess you’re the last of them.”

 He whistled to the pair of heavy horses, and the wagon lurched into movement. By the time we had rolled down the street, some of the group laughing self-consciously at smiles from shoppers and passersby, I’d learned that most of my fellow-passengers knew one another from the local college drama department. Madison (Blondie) and Emma (Supermodel) were from the next town away. The others were all from New Jerusalem, or from another even tinier town in the other direction, and had caught a ride in with a local farmer.

 By the time we turned off the shoulder of the highway onto a country lane, I was fighting  to keep my eyes open as the wagon jostled past a deep, mysterious stand of wood. I concentrated on the chatter around me, and picked up some stray facts about the gig. It seemed that once a year there was this traditional ball held at what they called _The R &B_. Local drama students were hired for the weekend to serve as staff, but they had to be in period costume, playing the roles of servants around the time of the Revolutionary War. But there was also to be some kind of period entertainment for the guests.

Blue Hair asked, “ _R_ &B? That’s the bed and breakfast, right?”

“Yup,” someone said.

 “And I thought New Jerusalem was dinky and totally stuck in the past. How can they possibly get any customers out here?”

 “They get a few tourists, but mostly it’s history students and the like. You’ve got to really be into nature and old stuff. The guy who runs it is kind of crazy that way.”

 Blue Hair muttered, “Sounds boring.”

 As the rest settled in to exchange gossip about people and places I’d never heard of, the fog gradually burned off, the sun shining down warm and pleasant. I began losing the battle to keep my eyelids open. I was startled into wakefulness again when Madison exclaimed in that tone of voice that you only hear when there’s a hot guy on the scene, “Oh, Van’s here.”

 I opened my eyes. The fog had lifted, revealing a little valley filled with old, gnarled apple trees wearing summer green, framing an enormous stone house. We jolted past a weather-beaten sign in old-fashioned scrolled script: REST-AND-BE-THANKFUL. And below it, in smaller lettering, _bed-and-breakfast_.

 Parked directly in front of an elegant old-world veranda was a screaming red Ferrari, looking very out of place.

 The wagon driver pulled up behind the Ferrari. The others began disentangling themselves from the luggage crammed around, under, and beside them. Since all I had was a backpack, I figured I’d get out of their way. I hopped over the side of the wagon and stepped up some low stairs to the flagged terrace.

The front door stood open. I paused and peered into the dim hallway. I could hear men’s voices. Arguing? I hesitated to go inside without invitation—though this was a b&b, it gave off private home vibes. Or maybe it was the tone of that conversation, the louder voice constantly interrupting the quieter one.

 “Look, Tom, we both know that you are going to have to sell up. Dad’s trying to be a nice guy here.”

 “Don’t let me keep you, Van,” the other said. “I know you’re very busy—”

 “Will you at least _listen_ , dammit?”

 “I have been this past half hour. More than you, as it hap—”

 “We both know this dump is overdue for the auction block.” Van’s voice was loud enough to reach the driveway, where the others paused, clutching their luggage and whispering. “You’re holding out just to be a jerk. There’s no other sane reason.”

 “Whatever you say, Van. Look, I hate to wind this up, but I think Jason just arrived with a wagon load of actors, and—”

 “Stop blowing me off, or I'll knock your block off!”

 Tom’s amused drawl revealed a trace of accent. “Pistols at dawn is against the law, these decadent modern days, but if you really feel the need to take a swing at me, you are welcome to try. You’ll find a couple of sabers outside there, over the mantelpiece. To your right, Van. No, your other right . . .”

 A walking tornado emerged abruptly out of the gloom of the entry hall and blew by me, nearly knocking me over. I jumped back, staring after a tall, broadly built guy in an Armani suit, his reddish-blond hair worn in a buzz.

 The other reenactors parted like a Red Sea of luggage as he charged through their midst, Madison calling in a cheerleader coo, “Hi, Van.”

 Van did not answer, or even turn his head as he slammed into the Ferrari and fired up the engine with a roar. A step next to me caused me to look up as a tall, thin guy lounged against the doorway, his brows raised over rectangular glasses. This had to be Tom.

 As the Ferrari roared off, kicking up gravel in all directions,  I looked back at Tom, distracted by his wide blue gaze of polite inquiry. “Still hiring?” I asked, trying to gather my scattered wits _._

 Tom stared, then blinked, and I could move again, as he said, “Let’s get everyone inside, shall we?”  He beckoned the group now approaching cautiously, as if Van’s stomping departure had left shrapnel and landmines in his wake. “Come in, come in. I apologize for the needlessly authentic transportation. The car had to be somewhere else, but we didn’t want to leave anyone tramping six miles from the train station.”

 Madison smiled up at him through her lashes as she walked up onto the terrace. “We hoped to get a ride in Queen Bess.”

 “Queen Bess got waylaid in Goshen,” Tom replied with a general smile, his icy hauteur totally gone. It was clear now that he’d been as pissed as Van, he just didn’t bluster and bellow. “There was some kerfuffle over the claret, which someone apparently mis-heard as _carrot_. As our hardy ancestors would turn over in their graves if we served vegetable juice in a ballroom, Jason is attempting to make the exchange.”

When everyone had reached the terrace and stood in a semi-circle, he said, “ So there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that the New Jerusalem Dance Academy volunteered to do the exhibition dancing this year for credit, and as our budget is, shall we say, less than optimal, their offer is actually good news for us, and was gratefully accepted. But the good news for you is, that means we can scrape the pittance we were offering for dancers over into the staff budget, which means we have space for more staff. Kate says we really need two more housemaids, two footmen indoors and one outdoors parking cars, and . . . maybe one other role.”

 He waited as exclamations and comments and rhetorical questions rippled through the students, his expression patient. When they were quiet again, he said, “So anyone not up for those places, Jason can take you back to town as soon as Queen Bess returns. If you go straight down the hall, jog around the stairway, and to the kitchen, you’ll find coffee and sandwiches. The rest, step into the office.”

 Since I had no expectations beyond the fervent hope of earning a little cash, I got in line as Tom led the way down the hardwood floors of the hall, past a closed fireplace (and yes, there really were swords over it, though they looked fairly well attached to the stone wall), around a massive stairway with gorgeous balustrade work.

 The light filtering in was golden and mellow as the summer sun beamed through the burned-off clouds on the west side of the house. The place looked well built but somewhat run down, reminding me of my ancient ballet teacher when I was small, who’d claimed to have been with the Russian ballet during the bad old days.  She’d had what they called excellent bones, her posture erect, but age still took its toll. And so it was here: despite everything polish and repair could do, the furnishings were old and worn.

 Madison walked directly behind Tom. “You didn’t mention Punch Girl. I know Punch Girl’s usually done by Ellie Shipley, but isn’t she like nine months pregnant?” She shook her garment bag.

 Tom opened a battered door into a small east-facing as he said, “Yes. Ellie declared a moratorium this year, and volunteered her ballet school instead. They’re getting a couple of months of lessons free, in exchange.”

 People spread out as Tom lounged on the edge of a colonial-era desk. “Here’s the deal. The gig pays two hundred bucks for two days—rehearsal tomorrow, the ball the next. Fifty bucks if you help us with breakdown on the third day. I know it’s terrible pay, but you do at least get room and board.”

Within three minutes he had all the footmen sorted out. While that was going on, I heard whispering behind me. The only thing audible was Madison’s “But the housemaids have to wear those dorky aprons and ruffled caps, and I _really_ want to wear my gown. It’s right in the period. I looked it up on the Internet.”

 When the guys were done, Tom turned to the females. He looked exactly as pleasant and friendly as he had since the Ferrari had roared off, but the set of his shoulders, the slight tilt to his well-cut chin made me think he was bracing himself as Madison pushed to the front of the group and said with that cheerleader confidence, “I’ll be the Punch Girl.”

 And, with a little too much bustle and way too much stagy hand business, she swept into a full Elizabethan court bow.

 Two of the girls looked impressed.  Blue Hair rolled her eyes. Tom’s expression was hard to interpret.

 Like I said, I’d gotten into re-enactment because I’d seen revenants going about their lives. But I’d also gotten myself fired over the same—once when it turned out the manager’s daughter was the one I told was handling her loom completely wrong, and before that, when I was in high school, I thought I was helping a teacher when I told him that the Hopi of that particular mesa didn’t perform their rain dance the way he was demonstrating for a festival. He was showing everyone the fake one they gave outsiders.

 Both times, Wrong Answer.

 But the slight wince, the hesitation in Tom’s face when Madison made her bow prompted me to say, “That would be an awesome courtesy for Shakespeare in the Park, but an unmarried girl around 1776 would probably curtsey like this to a guy her age.” I demonstrated, in spite of my jeans and T. “And more like this to someone older.” I dipped a little deeper, spreading my pretend skirt.

 It was only meant as a suggestion, not that I cared what role I got, but Tom turned my way and said quickly, “You’re right. In fact, it’s perfect. If you fit one of our costumes, will you take on the punch girl? It’s an easy role, if boring. All you do is stand behind the screen and ladle out punch to the one or two oldsters who don’t mind the taste of the family’s secret recipe for claret punch.” He turned to the others. “The housemaids get to play real roles, even if you do have to fluff the counterpanes and carry in the hot water pitchers and like that.”

 Madison’s pout changed to interest. It was pretty clear she was mentally weighing her specially brought gown stuck behind a screen against prancing around the house in the dorky housemaid ruffled cap and apron. And it looked like the ruffled cap was winning, as she turned a smile Tom’s way. “Okay. As long as you’re not bringing out the chamber pots.”

 Everybody laughed as Tom raised a hand like he was taking an oath. “No chamber pots.” To the rest of us, “Guests will be expected to use the bathrooms, we just pretend they’re in some other dimension. So your service is strictly confined to hot water pitchers, counterpanes, and ‘Would you care for bread and jam?’ And any period chat the guests want to get into, because they’re more or less pretending to be in period, too. We’ve already got four housemaids returned from last year. They say it’s actually pretty fun.”

 Blue Hair crossed her arms. “So do you have powdered wigs?” she said with an air of challenge.

 “Maidservants didn’t wear powdered wigs,” Tom answered as if her tone had been friendly. “And none of the rest of us will, either. We’d have to offer hazard pay if we expected people to wear heavy wigs, shedding powder at every step, in July.”

 “Guess I’m out, then. Oh well.” Blue Hair rolled her eyes again, her lip curled, making me wonder why she’d come out all this way when she so obviously didn’t want to be here.

 Emma spoke up, saying she’d wanted to be a dancer. Tom opened the door and politely fell in behind Blue Hair and Emma, saying, “There are sandwiches laid out in the kitchen. If you do change your mind, Miss Zinnia said she could use some more help, and as for dancing, why not come as a guest? You know it’s open to everyone after eight . . .”

 He vanished down the hall, his straight shoulders bisected by a light blond ponytail, which in the lancing afternoon light through an open door looked unexpectedly like one of those powdered wigs of the period.

I was alone by the office door, idly watching him; everyone else stood in knots, talking, so I was the only one to see Tom hand off the people to a tall, sober-faced woman seconds before a short, stout twenty-something tapped him on the shoulder from behind.

 She cast a quick, distracted glance around, then said in a low voice that carried down the hallway, “Prue says she saw Maddie Davis. With a garment bag. Did she bring that Cinderella dress of hers?”

 Tom murmured, “Way ahead of you, Kate.” He lowered his voice to a whisper, the only audible words being “ . . .one of the college students.”

 “ _Thank_ you.” Kate gave a short sigh. “I like Maddie, but _not_ anywhere near two-century-old crystal stemware. She can swan about and flirt as much as she likes upstairs. In fact, I’ll put her in charge of Bachelor Row. She’ll love it, and they’ll love her.”

 I realized I was eavesdropping, and backed inside the office, where the others were still chatting. Madison had inserted herself into the center of the guys, one hand playing with her hair as she began inventing a role, using an accent midway between the fake Cockney of a Disney flick and Monty Python.

 Then in walked a short, stocky, cheerful-faced guy whose sandy hair fell across his forehead in damp strands. “I’m Jason,” he said. “Let me give you the nickel tour.”

 He beckoned us to follow. Madison sidled up to Jason, cooing, “What’s going on with Van? Is his dad still trying to buy the place?”

 Jason shrugged. “Gotta ask Tom.” He started out, saying over his shoulder, “Okay, the room you’re leaving used to be the ladies’ morning room. As you saw, it’s the office for now. On your left is the library, which contains the few real antiques left, so it’ll stay locked up tomorrow. But next over is the billiards room, which occasionally doubled as a study for the Grahames who didn’t like billiards. On _this_ side are what used to be the two formal drawing rooms that opened into the ballroom. These days it’s pretty much rented out for period parties, lectures, and the occasional wedding reception. If you step through, turn to your right, and head toward the back, you’ll see the formal dining room, which lies all across the north end. That’s where we’ll serve the dinner tomorrow . . .”

 I could tell that none of the actors were readers, for they didn’t give the library so much as a glance. Some of the guys peered into the billiards room, but most went straight for  the ballroom.

 A library, for me, was an instant magnet—libraries had been my haven as a kid. The door was open a crack, sparking my curiosity. I peered through the narrow gap, and got a hazy impression of floor to ceiling bookcases filled with beautifully bound old books, large gilt-framed paintings too shadowy to make out, and fine old Chippendale furnishings, but what caught my attention was the slender male figure standing at the far window where the heavy curtains had been parted a few inches, his forehead pressed against the glass.

 I jerked away, and backtracked as quietly as I could, then caught up with the line as they trooped through the ballroom. This was a beautiful space, with a carved ceiling overhead in rococo arabesques, supporting two great crystal chandeliers. There were long windows all down one side, looking out over the terrace to a garden beyond. At the far end, in a corner adjacent to the dining room, which lay perpendicular to the drawing room, an old table had been set into a corner, further obscured by an old-fashioned painted Japanese screen in the style popular in Europe in the late eighteenth century. I suspected that I was looking at my post.

 That was okay with me. Hanging out behind that screen for a few hours would be the easiest two hundred bucks I’d made in ages. With luck, I could stretch that until I scrounged up another gig. I wouldn’t think about how the summer tourist season was already half over, and a lot of the reenactment places would be shutting down . . .

“ . . . my family has worked for the Grahames—that’s the former owners—since before the Revolution,” Jason was saying. “My grandmother is the head housekeeper. Call her Miss Zinnia. You’ll meet her at dinner. My great-grandfather, Christopher Seven, was the last butler. There was no Christopher Eight. Granny Zinnia and my two great-aunts were the last of the Christophers, which my mom says is just as well as there isn’t much call for a butler anymore, and nobody could imagine a male Christopher being anything else.” He paused as the group chuckled, and grinned back at us. “We MacIntoshes are everything else. We also know everything there is to know about this house, so any questions, I’m the one to come to, or my cousin Paul, who was driving the wagon, Prue in the kitchen, or my sister Kate.”

A whisper, a giggle (Madison) and one of the footmen said, as we trod past the long formal dining table, “Is it true the place is haunted?”

“Depends who you ask,” Jason said cheerfully. “ _I’ve_ never seen any. The only one of us who has is Aunt Carla. She saw one of the ghosts in the stable on Christmas morning, when she was ten. The old generation thought she’d been nipping at the adults’ eggnog.”

He got the expected laugh, then pointed. “Okay, through here, and up the stairs—this is where the head of the house used to hand off the candles to the family when they went to bed. You’ll be lighting the way with lamps for the guests. We turn off the electricity everywhere except the kitchen, to keep things fun. . .”

I lost track of his breezy voice when I saw my revenant for the fourth time, treading soulfully upstairs behind a pretty maid in a full-skirted dress of flowered chintz, organdy apron and ruffled cap.

* * *

Dinner was served to us in a large, airy room off the kitchen. We gathered around a sturdy, large table that probably did double duty as prep table. Jason sat at the head, but it was Tom who made it his business to ask about each person there. Not an interrogation; when it came to me, within two sentences ( _I’m Perdita Gutierrez, from Arizona. I travel around doing re-enactment gigs when I can find them, waitressing when I can’t_ ) he seemed to pick up that I didn’t like talking about myself, so the rest of my share of his questions was all about national parks and the Colorado River and how much he liked canoeing on the local lakes and streams.

Everybody else had plenty to say about themselves, mostly acting (no surprise there) even Blue Hair—named Phoebe—who’d turned out to have an interest in pastry-making. She would be hiding her electric blue hair under a kitchen cap.

Tom got her talking by asking about music, drawing from her the fact that she’d been part of a couple of punk bands that never got up enough steam to earn money before breaking up again. She said she’d been moving around a lot before ending up back in New Jerusalem where her granddad Lowry had run the local garage. Her frank, sometimes pungent language got everyone laughing, and the talk shifted from the stilted politeness of a bunch of strangers to a more comfortable atmosphere.

Madison, not surprisingly, talked the most. As I’d already gathered, she’s a local. She said she had an interest in theater—she’d starred as Cinderella in a high school play—but it was pretty clear from the way she interacted with everybody that her real interest seemed to be divided between cute guys and gossip; two hundred years ago she would have been a society butterfly, her vocation and avocation marrying as well as she could.

After dinner, we all lent a hand in clearing the table and stacking, washing, and drying dishes, over which the chatter was largely about past R&B July Fourth balls. From what I was hearing, this ball was the big social event locally; as was traditional, those related to the Grahames would arrive by wagon, spend the night of the ball, and return to town by wagon. Some years had been rendered special by the appearance of actual coaches. Though the Cunninghams’ Empress (so said Madison), a Rolls even older and grander than Queen Bess, was almost as good.

When we were done, Kate reappeared with armfuls of fabric. The maids’ outfits turned out to be pretty much what I’d seen on the maid with the revenant, except that these costumes had hems all the way to the floor.

Kate measured me with her eyes, rummaged through yards of silk and lace and velvet (or cheap facsimiles), paused, then darted away. She returned shortly, reverently carrying a yellow silk gown with antique lace along the square neck, lacing up the front with green silk cord. The skirt was polonaised, swooping to either side and held with emerald ribbon, over an under-skirt of white brocade. “This looks like it would be about your size,” she said. “Take care of it. That’s real silk—my mom says it belonged to Miss Peggy, right before she married and moved to England. I’ll bring your petticoats tomorrow.”

“Are you sure you trust me with this?” I asked doubtfully.

“Since you won’t be doing any dancing, it should be safe enough. And you, unlike Ellie, can actually wear yellow, so I know the old folks will love seeing this gown again.”  Kate peered at me more closely. “What color _are_ your eyes, anyway? Wow, they look like agates in this light.”

“Depends,” I said.

“What does it say on your driver’s license?” she asked with such frank interest, and such a friendly grin it didn’t feel nosy.

“Don’t have one,” I said. “Never learned to drive.”

“You sound just like Tom.” Kate chuckled. “In a pinch he can drive Queen Bess, but I strongly suspect he’d rather be tooling about in a curricle or phaeton. And he rides like a centaur. Anyway, you’ll look awesome—you’ve even got long hair.” She flicked one of my dark, waist-length braids.

“Long hair is a must for reenactments,” I said. “Unless you like wigs. But I’m not all that great at doing up those elaborate period hairdos,” I admitted.

“You don’t have to be. My cousin Lissa will do everyone’s hair on the day of the ball, when you’re all in character. Oh. Speaking of which, she will fall on you with glad cries if you’re willing to sleep with your hair in rags tomorrow night, which would spare you the curling iron. A lot of them really get into the whole period thing—it’s actually kind of fun, doing up each other’s hair. But don’t feel obliged.”

“Show me the rag strips, and I’m on,” I said.

She gave me a relieved smile. “I guess that’s it. We’ll be going over everything else in the morning, okay?”

There was a little more chatter—about everything except Van, Tom, and what had happened earlier—then some went off to play billiards in one of the downstairs rooms, a few others to watch TV on someone’s laptop, and a lot of us girls lined up to take a shower in the bathroom we all had to share.

Around ten, Jason and Kate’s mom chased everyone up to bed. “Long day tomorrow,” she kept saying. “You’ll be expected to be up bright and early.”

“Okay, spill,” Phoebe said a little later. “Who was the suit in the Ferrari, and what’s his issue?”

After we’d all been through the shower, those of us assigned the attic dorm that had once housed the female servants gathered on the middle two beds, everyone else sitting in a circle around a single lamp set on the floor. The room was pleasantly fixed up, with striped wallpaper and plain, sturdy furniture old enough to be charming under the slanted roof overhead.

“That suit,” Madison said as she lay on her stomach, hugging a pillow, “is none other than Ogden Van Spurter the ninth or tenth or something like that. His dad is like a hedge fund CEO. They used to own half the land along the Hudson.”

“Yeah,” said Jennifer, one of the maids who’d been here before. “During the railroad-building days, they owned half this town, too.”

Madison’s pale blue eyes reflected the lamplight as she shrugged. “All I know is what everybody who grew up in New Jerusalem knows, that the Van Spurters have been trying to buy this property for ages, some say ever since there _was_ a United States. There’s been like a feud between the families going back to those days.”

Jennifer damped Madison’s relish by saying, “Geez, Mad. You make it sound like the Hatfields versus the McCoys. Van and Tom were friends in prep school. My sister dated Van when they were sixteen. The feud is long gone.”

“That’s not what it sounded like when we arrived,” Phoebe retorted.

Jennifer’s brows went up. “We were all out in the stable. Didn’t hear anything. What happened?”

Madison gave a fairly accurate report, then hugged her pillow against her, clearly entertained. “My Mom is redoing the Cunninghams’ kitchen. The Cunninghams have always known the Grahames, that is, until there weren’t any more Grahames, after Old Enos died. Old Mrs. Cunningham was talking about gossip she’d gotten from _her_ grandmother, who was a real battle-axe.”

Jennifer nodded. “ _Everybody’s_ heard of her. She once told General Eisenhower to mind his own business, and it’s rumored she wrote a letter to Winston Churchill telling him exactly what was wrong with Europe, the day she got off the _Queen Mary_.”

Madison grinned. “Well, Mrs. Cunningham got onto the first Richard Grahame, and how he and Ogden the Second hated each other like poison.”

Jennifer said, “I know some of that from the Tatlock side of my family. One of them got the other into trouble with Washington during the Revolution, then he got his revenge somehow after the Peace was signed. Or tried to get it—the case dried up the way those things did in those days, with lack of evidence. It was a big deal, though.”

Madison nodded vigorously. “And ever since then, it’s been like a _thing_ with the Van Spurters, something about treasure.”

“Yeah, but nobody really believes it,” Jennifer scoffed.

“Well, Mrs. Cunningham does. Or at least, she told Mom that the Van Spurters are dead serious. That’s why the feud, and why they want this land. They think there’s hidden treasure somewhere.”

“Oh, give me a break,” Phoebe said. “Believe me. Treasures don’t stay hidden. They do get fenced, or spent, or boosted, and then somebody lies like a rug to cover it up.”

Jennifer nodded. “In _this_ town, everybody not only knows everybody else’s business, they know everybody’s business going ten generations back. That’s why _I_ don’t believe in any treasure.”

Madison shrugged again, and returned to what mattered most to her. “I think Van is kinda cute, even if he’s got a temper.”

“Cute?” Phoebe repeated. “You can have him. I’d take Tom any day.”

A couple of the other agreed, but Madison waved a hand. “Yeah, he’s cute, but he’s like totally insane. He could make a fortune with this place—and I don’t mean selling it to Van, or anybody else.”

“Insane?” Phoebe looked more interested than she had during the treasure talk. “Does he howl at the moon, or think he’s a rabbit?”

“Nothing that interesting,” Jennifer said, laughing. “It’s just that he’s thrown people out of R&B if they mess with the antiques, or hassled the animals, or stuff like that. He’s usually as nice as pie until someone crosses him, then he goes all whispery. That’s when he’s the most deadly.”

Madison said, “You know he’s broke, right? He pretty much said so, when he told us the pay is lousy. Well, Julia Cunningham told my mom that one of the biggest tour companies wanted to sign with him—it would have brought him _thousands_ a month all summer, enough so they could take in those totally broke history students that Tom seems to love, the rest of the year. He was even going for it until the tour people said—and really, they were _totally right_ —that ‘period atmosphere’ had to come with comfort, and comfort meant wifi, TVs in every room, a gaming center in the library instead of the ratty old books, and a sound system in the big room so that could get decent bands in, get rid of that old orchard and put in a pool and a tennis court. No big deal, you’d think. But oh no, suddenly he went all damn-your-eyes-my-lord and threw them out. Mom says if Rest-and-be-thankful didn’t grow their own food, they would be bankrupt for sure.” She flopped back. “So, yeah, he’s cute, but anybody who marries Tom is going to end up a slave to this tumbledown dump, a housemaid for real. He’s insane.”

Phoebe shot Madison a look of stony scorn. “You can get tennis courts anywhere. This place is so funky it’s cool.” She put her earphones in, and lay back with her iPod.

“We should probably all crash,” Jennifer suggested as Madison gave Phoebe a puzzled, hurt look. “When they said early, they mean early. Last year, Jason stood on the stairs banging with a spoon on a pot and I swear it was not a minute after six a.m.”

The others groaned. I didn’t say anything, but I was secretly relieved—by then I was so tired I could scarcely keep my eyes open.

I lay back gratefully into sleep . . . and fell into a jumble of dreams in which a reddish-haired guy attacked a slim blond fellow with a sword, and revenants moved through walls like ripples through water, and my dad, five years dead, stepped down from a wall, his eyes gleaming like agates. He smiled, clicked open his time piece, and said, “Isn’t it time you woke up?”

 “ . . . woke up? Rise and shine, campers! Last one downstairs gets the crumbs!” 

That was Jason’s merciless cheer, right outside on the attic landing. He gave a couple extra bangs on his pot, as Phoebe threw a pillow at the door and growled a stream of curses.

We raced downstairs to the kitchen to discover a gigantic breakfast waiting for us. Miss Gladiola, the cook, did not seem to have heard of such things as cholesterol or calories, judging from the stacks of fluffy pancakes, scrambled eggs with crumbled cheese, the crispy rashers of bacon, and the still-steaming blueberry muffins awaiting us. There was also a pot of creamy oatmeal for those who insisted; everything was gone by the time we got up and began busing the dishes.

By then we’d met the rest of the Christopher family. The old women were known as ‘Miss’ though all three were grandmothers. Miss Petunia was in charge of all the linens, helped by her granddaughter, a wispy little thing nicknamed Bets.

Some of the MacIntoshes were there as well. Skinny Prue, Paul’s sister, worked in the kitchen. Kate, who with Jason, seemed to be all-round jack hands. They were obviously brother and sister, both with unruly light brown hair, and sturdy builds. Carla, the tall, thin, somber-faced one, managed the barn—someone said she was a dressage rider turned farrier. All the animals were under her care.

Tom wasn’t there. He had apparently woken up and got to work long before anyone.

Once we’d tag-teamed the breakfast dishes, the dancers repaired to the ballroom in their leotards and leggings to warm up for their rehearsals, and the rest of us trooped off behind Kate as she said, “Now, I’ll show you where each of you will be stationed, and we’ll practice the traffic patterns. Believe me, you’ll need to know them what with everyone running up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, carrying trays and lamps, and dodging around guests.”

She turned my way. “Perdita, you can hang loose until the boys get the crystal stemware out. You and I will practice how to handle it. Until then, go ahead and explore. The garden is really pretty this time of year. Beyond is the orchard. You can’t get lost—there’s a gate at the far end.”

I obediently wandered out onto the terrace and into the garden, which really was beautiful, with trailing vines of various sorts draped gracefully from pots, and the flowerbeds looking their best beyond the shade of a magnificent oak. But the somnolent summer air filled with bees and gnats who all seemed to think I was lunch, and the sun baked down with a single-minded intensity, so I retreated inside again.

Here I found people busy in every room—the kitchen bustling, the dancers practicing an elaborately graceful gavotte in the ballroom. I backed hastily against a wall as a couple of the footmen dashed in brow-furrowed concentration between the study and the kitchen, their hands out-held as if holding invisible trays. I spotted the real trays in a small prep area off the pantry, being polished by Prue to a silver gleam.

Where to go? I spotted the cellar, which Jason had pointed out the day before, saying, “You won’t be going down there. Just as well, as the electricity is what we call creative. It shorts out pretty regularly, so we always keep a flashlight hanging on a hook.”

The cellar door stood partially open, and no one had said it was off-limits. Chilly air bathed my feet when I stepped on the first stone stair. That felt good. I tried clicking the light—and got nothing. So I picked up the flashlight and started down the steep stairs.

The cellar was deliciously cool, smelling of cold, dry stone, spices, and wine. I passed stacks of flour and dry goods and jars and jars of various preserves, apple, of course, in preponderance—though the empty shelves made it clear that they were working on the last of the previous year’s harvest. Across from those was an impressive wine rack, mostly empty, testament to better days long ago.

I started back, and nearly stumbled on what turned out to be an old glass jar half-buried in the dusty ground. When I played my flashlight over it, I discovered what I’d missed on coming down; nearly hidden by the stair was a darker space divided by honest-to-dungeon iron bars. The grating stood open. From the looks of the half-buried pot, nobody had used that space much in at least a century, maybe more. I leaned in, intrigued, but the cell was filled with nothing but dust, moss, and ancient spider webs.

I began to turn away, and nearly tripped over the buried pot again. Why hadn’t anyone bothered to pick it up? The long-ago servants must have been a bunch of slobs, I thought crossly as I straightened up.

Then a flicker caught my attention. In the slanting gleam of the flashlight, as dust swirled up in mesmerizing patterns, I saw my first household ghosts.

* * *

I know I’ve used the word ‘ghost’ once before. When I was really small, I used that interchangeably with the more difficult ‘revenant’ that my _abuela_ was careful to teach me.

As a kid, I couldn’t see any distinction. As I got older, _Abuelita_ had pointed out that though English wasn’t very exact about these things, _we_ should be: ‘ghosts’ should be reserved for apparitions of the dead, whereas ‘revenants’ might be glimpses from the earlier days of those still alive. They didn’t have to be dead because this was a different sort of Seeing.

Mom had argued bitterly with _Abuelita_ , demanding she not fill my head with nonsense, and I learned early never to mention my sightings to her.

But as the years went by, that wasn’t enough. I had only to be staring absently the way anyone might do for Mom to accuse me of faking madness to make myself interesting; then came the day a couple years ago when I saw a revenant of myself, sitting grief-stricken on the back porch, not long after _Abuelita_ died. It was the day I got that letter about my dad, the pocket watch sitting momentarily forgotten on my knee as I tried to take in the bad news. I understood then what ‘revenant’ meant, and I also decided then and there to leave home. Mom and I were never going to agree, but perhaps more important, I did not want to be haunted by my own bad memories.

The other thing about revenants or ghosts is that the slightest shift, and they vanish. I could hold them in sight if I stayed absolutely still, otherwise seeing them was kind of like looking into a kaleidoscope, or maybe a diamond—depending on the angle, the light refracted in a different spectrum. Move it the slightest degree, and everything changes.

The nearest I could figure is that time was somehow added to that spectrum, and possibly even mood, or I’d be knee-deep in ectoplasm from dawn to dusk. At most I saw a dozen or so a year.

As I stood there, the flashlight frozen in my hands, I stared down at the back of a scruffy powdered wig, worn by a slender guy in a shabby scarlet coat whose regimental facings were hidden in shadow as he bent forward to move one of what looked like rows of acorns and pecans on a battered chess board.

I heard a quiet ‘tick’ as he set the chestnut down, and the rustle of cloth as he bent to pick up a round-bodied glass pot.

The cuffs on his ill-fitting coat were too long, the left elbow patched, but his posture was elegant, the tilt of his head somehow humorous but carrying an air of good-natured challenge as he handed the glass pot through the bars to someone inside the gloomy cell, whose gesture as he received it conveyed the same air of elaborate courtesy. Both of their manners, the friendly pose with the iron bars dividing them, made me think of Tom the previous day, just before Van stomped off in a huff.

When I lifted the flashlight to get a look at the poor guy stuck behind the bars, the light shifted—of course—and both ghosts vanished.

Wow. That was the first time I’d _heard_ ghosts. What did _that_ mean? I leaned this way and that, shining the flashlight around, but all I saw were the spider webs, the ancient dust, and the half-buried pot.

I’d lost them. That much hadn’t changed.

I sighed, and continued on up the cellar steps. The maddening thing was, no matter how much I moved around trying to recapture an interesting moment, I could never seem to find the right place, or light, to see it again.

I hung the flashlight back in its place, and continued down the hall. Ordinarily I never talked about revenants, ghosts, apparitions, or poltergeists, but since Jason had made it plain that everyone knew about the ghosts, I thought I might as well ask someone in the household. I wasn’t consciously aiming at him, but instinct somehow brought me outside the office, where I was caught by the sound of Tom’s voice.

It was that same low, pleasant tone, the consonants crisply precise; I knew I had no business whatsoever listening, but I couldn’t help it, especially when I heard a retort in the distinctive smooth, smug tone of white guys who wake up every morning knowing that their billable hours are five hundred bucks plus. “Mr. Van Spurter sympathizes fully with the situation in England, but feels that a year has been plenty of time in which to come to a decision. I am therefore required to inform you, Mr. Sherwood, and Lord Thorne through you, that if a decision is not reached by noon July 5th, Mr. Van Spurter will proceed with the lawsuit.”

Tom did not raise his voice. If anything, it gentled, but the precision sharpened, the vowels lengthening into a hint of English drawl as he said, “In that case, I trust you will return my compliments to Mr. Van Spurter, and inform him that until things are resolved, if any of his engineers, inspectors, or assessors put a foot onto the property, I will have the law remove them. And you will have a counter-suit on your hands. No doubt—”  The humor was back. “—that is a cheering prospect for you and your colleague here, for whoever wins, _you_ must be paid, must you not? In any case, I believe our business is finished. I trust you can find your way out?”

The door opened suddenly, leaving me forehead to chin with Tom. His head tipped down, and for a heartbeat I got the full effect of the haughty reserve, then his expression melted into a kind of rueful, pained amusement as he stepped courteously aside.

A couple of guys in even more expensive suits than Van’s blew past me, wingtips clattering on the hardwood floors, leather briefcases a-swing. As the front door slammed behind them, Tom leaned against the doorway with a quiet sigh.

I said with heartfelt embarrassment and apology, “I’m so sorry. I know I had no business nosing into that conversation.”

Tom lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug. “Doesn’t matter—it’ll be all over town by tomorrow. In fact, knowing this valley, half of New Jerusalem is probably tweeting the other half the color of their ties, and what they ate for breakfast.” He glanced sideways with a weary air of question.

I said, “I actually came to ask about the ghosts I just saw in the cellar.”

I hadn’t sensed how wary he was under the weariness until it vanished. His brows shot up. They were long and winged. He snatched his reading glasses off and gazed down into my face with a reflective air of curiosity. His eyes were quite large when not half-hidden by  droopy eyelids behind the scholarly shield of his spectacles; the impact of that direct, summer-blue gaze fired my nerves hot then cold.

Looking past him at the window, I said, “In that little cell under the stair, I am pretty sure I saw what I think was a British officer. He was playing some kind of weird chess, using acorns. He was playing the game with somebody who I think was locked up. At least there was a hand that reached between the bars to get a scoop of brown stuff out of this glass pot.”

“Baked beans,” Tom said calmly. “They were, I believe, actually discussing field fortifications. The chestnuts must have been artillery emplacements, or maybe lines of cavalry, the acorns infantry columns.” He had been gazing at my face. When I looked up, it was he who looked away. “Did someone tell you about the bean pot?”

“The bean pot?”

“Surely you saw it. Half-buried in the dust. Since that night, in fact. It’s quite a family legend—no one has ever touched it.”

“Nobody told me anything. I tripped over the bean pot. And, well, I just happen . . . to see ghosts, sometimes. Revenants, my grandmother called them.”

Tom dropped the papers and looked down at his empty hands as if he could see his future written there, and what he saw was fairly bleak. Then he straightened up. “I guess it shows how desperate I am, but hey. I’m desperate. Can you actually _summon_ ghosts?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t understand why I see them, and they’ve never noticed me.”

He pinched his fingers between his brows. I was momentarily distracted by those hands, which were long and elegant, reminding me of the ghostly British officer’s hands.

Tom looked up, his thoughts apparently parallel as he said, “That ghost, if it’s the one I think it is, was an ancestor of mine.” And then, plainly, “How much did you hear just now?”

I repeated the gist of it: England, lawsuits. Monday deadline.

He swung to his feet and thrust the door closed, so that we were alone in the room.

It was not a tiny room—several of us had stood in it the afternoon previous. But when the door shut, the walls seemed to move closer, charging the air with intimacy. I could hear Tom’s breathing, I could smell the clean scents of soap and young man on a summer’s day. My nerves hummed, softer than the bees outside, and my heartbeat quickened.

Tom said, “One thing not many people know is that Van and his dad are desperate, too. They’re not bad guys—Van used to be a friend of mine in school. I spent a few Thanksgivings with them, and Van ran around with Jason and me during summers.” He lifted a shoulder, his lips curving ruefully. “They even have a standing invitation to the July Fourth ball.”

“Okay,” I said, distracted by the quality of light shining in his smooth blond hair, and outlining the fine line of his cheekbones. Glinting pinpoints of gold along his jawline; he’d forgotten to shave today.

He glanced at me, then away, and the words came more quickly. “A few years back, Van Senior was taken to the cleaners by some of his former buddies in the hedge fund business. His kingdom looks big, but it’s hollow. I can understand him wanting to hang onto it. However, equally inescapable, it would kill me to lose this house.”

“It’s yours, then?” I asked, making an effort to gather my wits. “I thought you were the manager, or something. That guy called you Mr. Sherwood, and said something about letting a ‘Lord Thorne’ know.”

“My father. Thorne is a title,” Tom said, and then, with a twisted smile and an undertone of desperate hilarity, he stuck out his hand, and when I laid mine in his, he shook it and this time the British accent was full on. “Richard Drummond Sherwood, at your service.” And at my expression, the hilarity brightened for a heartbeat, and he went on in his normal tones. “My twin’s is even worse: Peaceable Enos. ‘Rich’ is not a name, it’s a condition, and the less said about ‘Dick,’ the better. ‘Ricky’ was summarily rejected as it called up images of my mother’s father, who was what they used to call ‘rather a lad.’ There is absolutely nothing to be done with Peaceable. Before we ever went to school, my brother and I settled on Pat and Tom, out of sheer self-defense.”

“Tom being better than Drum, but sounding close?”

“Exactly. You have brothers?”

“No. But I was born the Year of the Jesses and Taylors—at school, every other boy or girl had those names. Some of them picked nicknames using the same sort of logic.”

His expression briefly cleared, as if my boring anecdote got him out of his personal hell for ten seconds. But then he lifted his chin, and I knew he was back in it again. “I’m my own steward, as my ancestors would say. My mother inherited this house, but she lives in England with my father, and my older sisters all married away. My brother, elder by five minutes, is tied to the title and property so my mother signed this house over to me when I turned twenty-one.”

“England,” I repeated. _Yep, I was right about the accent_.

“I was born there. We used to come over for the summer hols, every year. When I was old enough for the prep school my Grahame relatives had been sent to, I stayed on. The first time I saw this house I fell in love with it. Still am. If I can hold onto it.”

“They said something about a lawsuit.”

“Yes. If I sign the papers the lawyers brought, then the mysterious lawsuit that will be instituted against my father for tax fraud will all go away. I can’t prove that Van and his dad are behind it, any more than I can be sure their promise to make it go away is just blowing smoke.”

“You and your dad don’t have your own team of attack lawyers?”

“We look good on paper—the inheritance I mentioned, which is saved from being gobbled up by the National Trust only by my demented great-aunt leaving her fortune in an air-tight trust to preserve the property—but that’s it. There’s no money. My father is a university professor. He’s up in years. Pat and I were born late. Our father’s nearly ready to retire; he wants to write the family history that he’s been gathering notes for all his life. He doesn’t deserve to go out under a cloud of falsely-brought scandal.”

“Why is a guy in financial trouble trying to force you to sell up? You’d think he’d be the one selling.”

“There’s a reason. But it sounds every bit as demented as talk of ghosts: for two hundred years there’s been a persistent rumor of a treasure buried somewhere on this property. And the Van Spurters have been behind the persistence.”

“I take it you’ve searched?”

Tom’s lips twisted. “I think everyone who has lived in this house since the War of 1812 has searched from attic to cellar, and dug up nearly every square foot of field. In the previous generation, Old Enos and his brother Ricky nearly killed half the apple orchard when they were in grade school, trying to find treasure chests among the roots.” He picked up his glasses, turning them over and over on his palm as he went on. “Jason, Paul, Kate, and Prue and I spent nearly every summer searching.  Inside and out. We tapped walls in the cellar, and we even braved the spiders in the prison hole to dig up its floor. For our pains we got covered in black mold, disturbed an enormous colony of beetles, and disclosed a couple of hairpins that Lissa MacIntosh says date back to around 1900. They must have dropped when the Grahame kids of that era were busy digging in the same spot. We pressed every single board in the treasure room. . .” He stopped there, and made a general gesture with his glasses. “Nothing.”

“There’s a treasure room?” I couldn’t help asking. “Seriously?”

Tom flashed a grin. “It’s a secret cabinet built behind the study wall, under the stairway. All it contains these days are the few modern items we hide for the ball. The few valuable antiques that haven’t been sold off, or sent to Thorne, are locked up in the library.”

“I take it you’ve checked outside?”

“Many times. Us, and those before us. Van even helped us, one summer, though I suspect it was on his dad’s orders.”

“Is there a map or something?”

“You’d think so,” Tom retorted cheerfully. “This family, both sides, being irrationally fond of codes and ciphers.  But not a scrap. All we’ve turned up are artifacts from the First Nation tribes who used to pass through here. Musket balls. The summer Van spent here we discovered a cave, but all it contained was the remains of a camp that had probably belonged to a French trapper. It lies alongside the finger of the lake between the two hills bordering the property.”

He paused, and slid his reading glassed back on. With them he seemed to withdraw behind the courteous air that I was beginning to suspect he wore like a shield. “Please forgive me for boring on about my affairs, Perdita. There is no reason for you to be concerned. I guess it was your mention of our ghosts, who have ever been an unruly lot. But when have ghosts ever paid the least attention to the desires of the living?”

My heart wrung; he’d admitted to desperation, but I did not know how to help. And he could obviously see it. Even without having heard Madison’s gossip it was easy to see that he was proud. He certainly would not want my pity.

How to get out of there with the least amount of awkwardness?

I have a cell phone, but it’s a cheapo pay-by-the-month thing that is basically for job callbacks, because who else would use it? So I never use it to check the time. To give my hands something to do, I pulled out my watch.

I was still hyper-aware of him, so I sensed him stilling as I clicked it open and said without really glancing at it, “Whoa, check out the time. Kate must be looking for me.”

“A handsome timepiece,” Tom said, sounding even more courteous and polite. My heart wrung again at the effort he was obviously making at civil conversation, and I backed away hastily as he said, “Where did you get that?”

“Inherited it from my dad,” I answered as I slipped out of the office.

I couldn’t help peeking before I shut the door. All I saw was the top of his head, fine strands of blond hair catching the morning light behind him as he picked up and put down the stack of papers the lawyers had left.

* * *

By the time lunch was called, I could see by the grim faces among the Christopher and MacIntosh group when they thought nobody was looking how the bad news was progressing through them, one by one. But they were trying to hide their real thoughts from us actors. The conversation over lunch was superficially easy, mostly about details of the ball, and the reenactors were encouraged to get into their roles by making up their new biographies.

When it came to my turn, Kate said before I opened my mouth, “Since you’re going to be the young lady of the house, I’ll tell you all about Miss Barbara when we go over the punch bowl routine.”

I agreed, and I swear that she, Carla, and Prue exchanged Meaningful Glances.

After lunch, it was time for the first rehearsal in character. While the actors trooped off to their stations, Kate accompanied me to the ballroom and introduced me to my post behind the _japonaise_ screen. Someone had been busy during the morning; beautiful cut crystal punch glasses had been set out on silver trays beside a magnificent silver punch bowl that had been polished to brilliance.

“Here is the ladle. You dip it this way, and pour like this,” Kate said, scooping the ladle into the air and pantomiming pouring, as beyond us, the dancers gathered for their entrance to the dining room.

She handed me the ladle with a serious air, and I pretended to dip and pour several glasses of punch without actually touching the crystal, until someone started up a recording (the rehearsal with the octet would take place on the morrow) and pregnant Ellie Shipley, a thirty-something woman with brilliant red hair, began counting the beats.

I’d gathered from bits of gossip while we were doing the lunch dishes that Ellie was descended from the elder brother of the Eleanor Shipley who’d married the Richard Grahame of the Revolutionary period. Ellie had been a Broadway dancer until she married and moved back to New Jerusalem, where she’d started up a ballet school. 

“ . . . and three and four and _pas de bourrée_ —”

Kate set the ladle down and leaned toward me. “Tom says you saw the ghosts.”

In the background, violins spun out a gavotte by François-Joseph Gossec, punctuated by the quiet thud of dancers’ feat. Using that noise as cover, I described what I’d seen.

Kate listened intently, her brown eyes narrowing at the mention of the patched elbow on the British officer’s uniform. When I finished, she gave a short nod. “That was Peaceable Drummond Sherwood.”

“Drummond! Sherwood! So _he’s_ the connection to Tom, not the Grahame family?”

Her eyes rounded. “Tom told you that? I mean, his name?”

“Shouldn’t he have?” I asked, as surprised as she looked.

Her eyes narrowed to a considering expression. “Not at all—I mean, there’s nothing _wrong_ , it’s just that I don’t remember him _ever_ telling anyone outside of _us_.” She lifted her hand, scooping it to include the house. “Anyway, Peaceable Drummond later became the Earl of Thorne. He was a mere Captain Sherwood during the War of Independence. Richard Grahame was sent by Washington to capture him, only the captain nabbed Richard first. The story is quite famous in the family history, how the captain and Richard shared a pot of beans and talked about strategy and tactics as if they were the best of friends. Which later they became.”

“Does that incident have anything to do with this treasure rumor?” I asked.

She shook her head quickly. “The treasure supposedly happened after the war, in the late 1780s. Aunt Carla or my cousin Lissa can fill you in on what little we know. Aunt Carla saw one of the ghosts when she was a kid. Lissa knows all the old gossip that you don’t get in history books.”

“So I take it they’ve searched, too?”

“We all did. Not only this house, but the garden house as well. The MacIntoshes served the Grahames in the Old Country. When they all came here, we took care of the land.”

The dancers had paused, and stood in a charming cluster as Ellie demonstrated a step, light and graceful in spite of her round middle.

Kate had been frowning down into the Paul Revere punch bowl as if some secret lay in its burnished silver depths. Then she gave a grunt, beckoned to me, and we crossed the ballroom, dodging the footmen busy bringing out spindly oval-backed chairs to set along the walls.

As we ducked into the hall and made the turning toward the stair, she looked into the pantry. She smiled at the sight of Phoebe’s bright blue hair. “I nearly fainted when I saw her hair yesterday—it was brown the morning before, when Old Lady Lowry caught me in Jerusalem Street and insisted we find a spot for Phoebe, who recently moved back to town. Her parents left town under somewhat of a cloud when Phoebe was small, then I guess they split, and Phoebe bounced around until she ended up back here. I’m surprised she even came. Blue hair! It’s like she wanted to be rejected,” Kate said as we trod the stairway, pausing to press ourselves against the banister as housemaids and footmen dashed up and down, laughing and talking in a variety of weird attempts at period language.

“Maybe she expected it?” I ventured, thinking of the prickly Phoebe.

Kate gave me a slow nod, then continued up the stairs. “Maybe, but Tom seems to have talked her round, yesterday. At least, Great-Aunt Gladiola says Phoebe’s got a quick hand with the apple tarts. They’re going to be as pretty as anything you’d see in a French bakery.”

She paused when we reached the turning in the stair. Instead of going up to the next level, she lifted a hand toward the shadowy paneled walls, and indicated a life-sized painting that I’d managed not to notice—the night before I’d been falling asleep on my feet, and that morning, I’d been watching the stairs as I raced down behind the others to breakfast.

From her gilt frame, a dazzling beauty with gray eyes and dark ringlets gazed mockingly down at us, her smile secretive as one hand caressed a horse, and the other tucked back a curl into the hood of her flowing crimson cape.

“That,” Kate said with satisfaction, “is Miss Barbara Grahame, the Countess of Thorne after she married. And there is your connection.”

“Wait a minute, Thorne? The same British officer—”

“Who captured Richard Grahame, yes. He captured her, too. Well, rescued and captured—he was going to ransom them both, but she turned the tables on him that very night. Christmas Eve, it was. He ended up in Goshen jail for six months, then escaped. In fact, it was July 4th weekend—the very first ball—when he showed up here, and Miss Barbara helped him escape. It was incredibly romantic.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Miss Barbara didn’t actually stand behind the punch bowl that first year. She had Captain Sherwood do it. I don’t quite remember all the details, but Carla knows. Richard insisted she passed out the punch as penance the next two years—he was always joking with her—but _she_ said it was to escape the courting attempts of guys like Colonel Ogden Van Spurter, until the Peace. After that she married their ex-enemy and sailed off to England, but the families always stayed close, writing letters back and forth with every ship, and then the earl and countess returned a few years later. That’s when the treasure business supposedly happened.”

I gazed up at Barbara’s face, nagged by this odd sense that I’d seen it before. But I knew I hadn’t.

“Miss Peggy’s gown is said to be modeled on the one Miss Barbara wore that night,” Kate said as we trooped back downstairs.

* * *

Later that afternoon I was assigned to help Carla in the stable, since there was no use in my standing behind my punch bowl, pretending to fill glasses, while the others rehearsed their more complicated roles.

The barn was large, airy, and clean, the two cows who provided the household milk munching rhythmically, a goat baaing out in the yard at some romping dogs; one of the household cats was on sentry duty, delicately walking the hayloft fence on the watch for rodents, tail a question mark, and another cat lay spread out on a saddle pad like a queen on her throne, watching us slit-eyed as we worked on the horses.

Carla was one of those ageless women, slender and strong, dark hair curly without a hint of gray. Only when you got up close could you see the softening of features that indicated she was probably in her sixties.

She put me to work braiding ribbons into the manes and tales of the two big, patient horses who would pull the decorated wagon full of New Jerusalem guests to Rest-And-Be-Thankful the next day.

I said, “Jason mentioned that you saw one of the ghosts.”

Carla gave me a quick glance. Her fingers divided a lock of mane into three careful segments before she spoke. “Barbara Grahame came to me. Once. It was Christmas Eve, when I was ten.” She lifted her gaze. Her eyes were a smoky gray-blue. “I hear you talk to ghosts?”

“I don’t talk to them, I just see them. Um, when they were alive. They don’t see me.”

“Ah.” The note was long and interrogative.

“So, Kate says you can tell me more about Peaceable Sherwood, especially at the first ball. He escaped from jail and came straight _here?_ Where he was first captured?”

“They were hunting him all over Orange County, but he wouldn’t leave until Barbara promised to marry him,” Carla said.

“But how could she possibly agree to that? Hadn’t she spoken to him, like, twice?” I asked.

Carla’s habitual expression was pensive, but when she smiled it was quick, a curiously sweet, lopsided smile. “They both insisted afterward that it’d been love at first sight.”

 _Like that always works out well_ , I thought, my mind flashing on Tom’s steady blue gaze, then bouncing straight to my mom, who’d married my laughing, sauntering father—and then promptly tried to reform him into the guy she wanted him to be. What I did say was, “They were luckier than most.”

“Luckier than most,” she repeated, her tone difficult to interpret. “It’s possible there was no luck involved. Maybe I should say coincidence, as I don’t really know what ‘luck’ means, especially within the context of love.”

“My mom would say luck doesn’t exist.”

“A lot of people would agree.” Carla shrugged slightly. “According to the family records, Peaceable himself told Barbara the first night they met that the Grahames and the Sherwoods had been chasing one another over the Scots-English border since medieval times. Though he was hardly in the good graces of the upper command, he was very good at contriving what he wanted. The Sherwoods were notorious for that. When they gained their rank, the motto they adopted was _Quod desidero obtineo._ We think that Captain Sherwood has to have known there were Grahames in the area. He was probably curious enough to make certain he was ordered here to try his plan. He could as easily have gone somewhere with more strategic importance.”

“True,” I said. “So what can you tell me about the treasure?”

“Lissa can fill you in on the ancient family gossip when she does your hair tomorrow. It was 1786. Peaceable Sherwood in his capacity as Earl of Thorne and as a newly minted general in the British Army, was intercepted by order from London when his ship docked in New Brunswick, where Benedict Arnold had recently moved. Arnold, who’d taken a commission in the British army, was always suggesting plans to Whitehall. This latest one involved raising a force of disaffected loyalists in a straight line from Niagara down to New York, the idea being to cut the country in half.”

“I never heard of that,” I exclaimed.

“Well, there’s a reason,” Carla said, as she handed me the curry brush and we moved to the second horse. “Round in circles, that’s right—go with the way the hair grows.”

As we brushed down the horse, whose head drooped with bliss, she gave me the facts, which were sparse enough: the governor of the area had received orders to pass on to the earl. He, being familiar with the area in question, was to carry a chest of gold that had been taken off a Dutch trader during England’s recent conflict with them.

“Wait,” I said, frowning as I ran the curry brush down the horse’s legs. “I’m no expert in American history, but I do remember a test question. Didn’t England’s war with the Dutch end around the time of the Yorktown peace?”

“1784,” Carla said with an air of faint approval. “There was some suspicion that the British captain in question had committed piracy instead of privateering. You know the only difference was a piece of paper, at times.”

“A letter of marque and reprisal. Yeah, and there was also the fact that news traveled slowly, especially when ships were traveling all over the world.”

“Still, there was a long enough gap that they didn’t let the captain keep it, but they also didn’t want to send it back to London, where the Dutch ambassador might demand its return. So Peaceable Sherwood was ordered to take it to western Massachusetts.”

“Wait—is this in any way connected to Shay’s Rebellion?”

“That’s where things get fuzzy. What we do know is that Ogden Van Spurter had, in his capacity as a retired colonel, sold a bunch of their Hudson real estate—which wasn’t worth much in those days—in order to start up a forge to make weapons. For him, starting up the war again was sure to be profitable.”

“Was he a turncoat like Arnold?”

“I don’t think it was that easy to define. Somehow he knew about the plot, because he’d readied wagons of arms—he insisted ever afterwards were for raising a defensive force against this rumored rebellion, which he was to command. Anyway, the local governor, also hearing of the plot, got wind of the plan, and Richard Grahame, also a retired colonel, was issued orders to raise his old troop and intercept the treasure and deliver it to Van Spurter. No one knows what actually happened, only that the gold vanished somewhere in Orange County.”

“Wow.”

“Miss Barbara was seen riding around in the woods at that very same time. Then she, too, vanished, and she and the earl were next heard of dancing in Halifax and being entertained as the guests of the governor, where the countess was toasted as the latest beauty.”

I picked up a scarlet ribbon, thinking of that secretive smile in the crimson hood, as Carla went on. “So after Shay’s Rebellion, Van Spurter raised a big ruckus, accusing Richard Grahame of stealing the money meant for the state defense—”

“What?”

She nodded. “Exactly. Remember, this was while the Articles of Confederation were going down in flames. Everybody claimed jurisdiction, nobody had proof of anything, and nobody was sure what laws prevailed and where. Richard Grahame insisted that if there ever had been a treasure, it had gone to ground, and things rumbled along—mail and travel was so slow in those days—until the French Revolution blew up, dragging the British into yet another war.”

“’Gone to ground.’ Was that a hint?”

“Old Sputters thought so—that was Ogden Van Spurter’s nickname in those days. But he could never prove it. Lissa will tell you the family stories, one of which is that Ogden Van Spurter had been leading his own former troops, in secret, to intercept the gold—he didn’t trust Richard, who discovered him poking around the property, and invited him and his rowdies to take themselves off. An invitation backed up by all the local farmers and merchants, with their blunderbusses and ancient musketoons all loaded and pointed. Van Spurter having made himself very unpopular as he was traveling fast, too fast for a supply train. Their idea of forage was to take what they wanted from the local populace.”

“I thought everybody did in those days.”

“They did. Peaceable Sherwood had been notorious, but he was at least polite about it—wouldn’t let his men hassle the local girls, never took anything from anyone so poor it would put them in hardship. Sputters didn’t care. Claimed it was their patriotic duty.”

“So what you’re saying is that whatever happened, happened right here?”

Carla peered solemnly over the horse’s neck at me. “Right here. At Rest-And-Be-Thankful.” She handed over a fresh supply of red, white, and blue ribbons. “Let’s start on the mane.”

* * *

We were done with the horses, which left me free until dinner.

I walked back to the house, my emotions in turmoil. Ghosts! For the first time ever, this weird . . . _thing_ I had might actually be useful. Except I had absolutely no control over it.

There was one thing I did know: within the last twenty-four hours I’d seen more revenant and ghost action than I had in the past six months. If the house was haunted, maybe by those who’d hidden the treasure, might I find it if I was logical and thorough?

I decided to start at the top and work my way down. As I tromped up three flights of stairs, my thoughts were occupied by a pleasing scenario centering around me waving my hand grandly like a magic show impresario, as I said to the grateful and amazed Tom, “Here is your treasure. The ghosts pointed right to it . . .”

The under-servants had lived at either end in the big attic dorms. Between those numbered the small single chambers for higher servants, and storage areas. I poked my way through everything that wasn’t locked.

Nada.

Laughing somewhat grimly at myself, I abandoned the modest speech I’d been mentally concocting, and wiped my forehead on my T-shirt sleeve as I lingered on the stairway. Okay, so it wasn’t going to be easy.

I started down again—and nearly tripped and fell when I reached the second floor landing.  A flicker at the corner of my eye resolved into Tom as a kid, poised and motionless, instantly recognizable despite his boyish round cheeks. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen. He paused as if listening to someone, then looked down, tucked a fencing saber under his arm, and stooped to pick up the mask he’d dropped. Then he ran lightly downstairs, fading into the gloom on the landing.

Of course he’d studied fencing. Somehow I was not surprised.

In a corner room with east and south facing windows, the light pooled on an ancient rug. I paused between steps. Instead of empty air, I saw a sturdy, battered table at which were seated two dark-haired kids in eighteenth century clothes, the girl with curly hair escaping from her braid.  The third person was a sour-faced man wearing a really ugly scratch wig, busy dipping his pen and writing something with angry slashes and stabbings of his quill.

The boy had a book open before him, but he was staring into space; I could only see the curve of his cheek, and a messy queue of dark hair.  From my vantage I watched the girl sneakily writing letters one at a time with chalk on a slate; under the table, visible from my place in the doorway, I saw the boy thrust the toe of his shoe against the outside of her foot, and she wrote N. Then he tapped the top of her foot, and she wrote O. His foot drew down to her instep; instead of moving her foot, or kicking back, she wrote W. This went on for a while, as I stood there, barely breathing: it was a code! Were these Barbara and her brother?

Abruptly Barbara kicked Richard in the ankle. It had to mean _Watch Out!_ for Richard picked up his pen as the teacher’s sour expression crimped into evil intent. He reached for an ash switch lying close to hand. . .

The curtains blew in, bringing a smell of wet grass on a fitful breeze. The brief distraction caused my gaze to shift to the window. When I looked back, the kids and their horrible tutor were gone.

As I walked along the upstairs hall, roughly shaped in a U, I began to see flashes of individuals walking to and fro, reading, painting in water colors, and once a young fellow in an Edwardian longcoat carefully trimming his moustache in a tiny mirror.

I also glimpsed artisans and painters, servants and family members as they gave each room its character. When I reached the ground floor, here were figures twirling around the ballroom floor, the women in ribboned flounces and gigot sleeves, and there a cluster of young people singing as someone banged at a piano that had since disappeared.

There in the soft lighting worked carpenters. In the hall, a young butler, his skinny Adam’s apple bobbing above his stiff collar as he carefully wound the grandfather clock; he and the clock both faded, to be replaced by a stonemason, standing with a small, powerfully built edition of himself—obviously his son—as they looked at what would become one of the two great chimneys.

I saw the hands that had fashioned the beautiful moldings, carved the banisters and balustrades, set the flagstones on the terrace; I glimpsed some young Grahame, tousled braids flapping on her back, as she planted geraniums in one of the urns outside. (I dug my fingers down into the soil of exactly one urn, then caught sight of another hand doing the same thing, sometime in the past.) These were brief, less than a second, but more of them in the aggregate than I had ever seen in my life.

The word haunted, with all its connotations of horror, was utterly wrong. The ghosts changed my perception of the house: its beauty glowed in three dimensions, no four. No, five: it was not just a work of art but of love, made in willing community by many hands.

When Jason banged on his pot to call us all to dinner, I wandered through the slanting shafts of sunlight lighting swirling dust motes into brief sparks of fire.

I was just reaching the last step when a tall, red-haired figure appeared, her uplifted face brightening when she saw me. “There you are. Perdita . . .what was your last name?”

“Gutierrez,” I said.

“Perdita. What a pretty name! I’m Ellie. I was hoping you could do me a huge favor.”

“Sure,” I said, a little apprehensively. Though I’d loved ballet, I’d had to quit lessons when I was in high school. There was no way I would be able to fit myself among her dancers, if one had dropped out.

She grinned, as if reading my mind. “Nothing major. It’s just that I really hate sitting at tables these days.” A hand to her middle. “If you could see your way clear to taking my place at the dinner tomorrow, well, you’d be sparing my back.”

“But . . . the dinner? With the guests? Don’t you play the hostess?”

“Oh, no. The role-playing is pretty much confined to the staff, to set the mood. All the guests will be in period costume, but nobody is really _being_ anybody, unless it’s their vague idea of how their ancestors might have behaved. My dad will be here as the Shipley representative, and in any case, old Mrs. Cunningham always presides—at least until Tom should marry. She knows old-fashioned manners to a fare-thee-well, which kind of serves as a guide to the rest. And she loves doing it.” Ellie grinned.

“So what do I do?”

“Just enjoy the meal, and be there for Tom to talk to besides Mrs. Cornelius, who will be at his left, and whose entire conversation revolves around her prize Pekes. Your other dinner partner will be Dr. Lewis, who is ninety-three. In those days, it was not polite to talk across the table, though Mrs. Cunningham will, you will note, talk at the centerpiece if she decides she entire company requires the benefit of her words. The rest of the time you get to watch the show.”

“It sounds like fun,” I said sincerely. “I’d be glad to, if you are really sure.”

“What a relief,” Ellie said, falling in step beside me as we walked to the kitchen. “Now I can hide myself comfortably in the pantry with Prue, Bets, and an electric fan, and enjoy the show from the hall.”

She flashed a last smile my way as we took the last two empty chairs at the table. People were busy passing around platters of barbequed ribs, cornbread, three kinds of vegetables, rice pilaf, with three apple pies waiting on the sideboard.

After dinner, it was time to try on the costumes, in case anyone had to have adjustments made. Period clothes, with their laces and ties, could fit a variety of bodies of the same general size, so it turned out not much needed redoing.

Then in came an elegant person around my age, her hair in a classic chignon. She carried a basket. The guys were sent off and the females gathered around the table. “I’m Lissa,” the woman said. “Who is up for rag curlers? Avoid the smell of toasty curling iron tomorrow.”

“Not me.” Phoebe gave a short laugh, and shook her head. Her blue hair was about three inches long, at most.

“Stick around.” Prue spoke softly, wispy little junior-high-aged Bets nodding vigorously from her chair. “You helped us bake the cookies, so you get to stay and help us eat them.”

Phoebe gave a sharp shrug, but her mouth was the most relaxed I’d ever seen it, as though she was pleased, but dared not to show it lest it all be a joke, as she yanked out a chair and plopped into it.

Lissa demonstrated how to wrap a lock in the rag and twist the long end up to tie at the top, everyone pitched in to do someone else, and we were done in an hour. The night air was warm and still as we threaded through the pantry.

Before I reached the stairs, Carla appeared from the hall beyond the grandfather clock, and handed me something. I took it, my fingers closing around a small book—very old, complete to brass clasps. “Good night,” was all Carla said.

When at last I’d had my turn in the shower and climbed into bed, by the light of the single lamp I brought out the book Carla had handed me and opened it with careful fingers. The frontispiece was not promising—an engraving of a lugubrious guy in a late Tudor ruff, looking skyward.

The title, done in the difficult print of the early 1600s—complete to “f”s for “s”s—was _A Treatise of Apparitions and Spirits Walking the Earth_. And the author was one Abraham Potter, intimidatingly labeled a “Learned and Excellent Minister of the Gospel.”

Whoa. I thought religious people thought ghosts were Satanic? But that was my mom talking, always reducing people or ideas that she didn’t like to the narrowest and most risible interpretation, which made them easier to dismiss from the position of moral superiority. _Abuelita_ had been deeply religious, and had never once called any joyous aspect of human behavior satanic. Nor had she said the revenants or ghosts were evil or devilish, just that they _were_.

I fell asleep in the middle of long, cumbersomely earnest passages that detailed types of ghosts, unaware when someone else turned out the light.

* * *

The next morning, I woke with an air of expectation.

Somewhat self-consciously, at first, the others got right into their roles. The conversation thus seemed curiously suspended in time, as we got dressed—not quite period, for despite our hair in rags we were still in our modern clothes. The costumes were to be put on at noon, before the first (overnight) guests came in on the wagon.

 Even Phoebe had gotten into the spirit of things; the iPod was gone, her electric blue hair tucked under her flouncy mobcap.

The air was still and breathless. My forehead panged faintly, promising a headache if I went outside for too long. When Prue told me that I’d be last for the hairdressing, I grabbed a single piece of toast and retreated upstairs, determined to finish that ghost book.

From below came the leaping cadenzas of real violins as the dancers and the octet had their dress rehearsal. Between the brilliant melodic intricacies of Haydn and Gossec, and the ponderous early seventeenth century language of the learned professor, I felt as if I had slipped out of time.

I was just finishing the last pages when someone called up the stairs, “Perdita! Lissa is ready for you.”

I closed the book, and shut the clasps, grimacing in embarrassment, though there was no one there to see me. Potter had been quite definitive there, at the end, about the ghosts that came not so much to reveal hidden treasures as to give aid and comfort to what in the language of 1619 meant emotionally deprived girls. Was that the way the others saw me?

I knew I shouldn’t make assumptions—it could be that no one had really plowed their way through that molasses-thick text. Maybe they only knew the book was about ghosts. Still, I was feeling a bit disgruntled as I walked downstairs, book in hand to be returned.

I sat in Lissa’s on the screened back porch. “Won’t a hairdo fall down by tonight?”

Her fingers had rapidly undone three curls by the time I said that. “Oh, no,” she responded cheerfully. “These hairstyles were meant to stay up all day. And your hair really holds curl.” She shook out another rag strip, and I felt a long curl spring free and fall down my back. “I see you’ve got Abraham Potter there,” she said casually.

“Carla gave it to me last night,” I said. “She seemed to think it would be worth reading.”

Lissa chuckled as she began to brush each curl and wind it around her finger. “By which tone I gather you didn’t. You know Carla is the only one of any of us who’s actually seen one of the infamous ghosts. My theory is that if they really exist, only the Grahames, or their descendants, see them. My mom, who is one quarter Iroquois, has some beliefs about connections—some people say soul families. If anyone is connected that way, it would be the Sherwoods and the Grahames, but my point is, maybe they are more likely to see their ancestral ghosts.”

 “Carla is a Grahame?”

Lissa chuckled again. “In all the important ways. Nowadays these things are looked at differently, but back then . . . Well, Ricky, Old Enos’s brother, was handsome and charming. Everybody claims he had wanderlust. Maybe that’s true.” She paused, and began sculpting my hair in interwoven locks on my head. “Zinnia was barely sixteen when she and Ricky caught each other’s eye, and, well, suddenly Carla was on the way.”

“That was a big deal back then, wasn’t it?”

“Oh-h-h yes. I will say this for him, he was all ready to marry Zinnia when old Mr. Grahame found out. He was friends with the local justice of the peace, you see, and the old fogey ratted them out. Zinnia was sacked, and Ricky took off, never to return. He was written out of his father’s will. Zinnia went to a relation in Goshen, where Aunt Carla was born. They lived there until Mr. Grahame died. Zinnia came back and took up her old position as upstairs housemaid, soon marrying my grandfather. Enos didn’t know who Carla really was—he thought she was a MacIntosh, and Grandpa, bless his heart, never said different, nor treated her as if she wasn’t his. It was he who saw to it she got her dressage lessons. She won ribbons all over the east for her riding, before she gave it up to become a farrier.”

“So Enos never knew that his brother had another kid besides Peggy Grahame?”

“He was away at school when it all happened. All he was told was that his brother disgraced himself and left. But I will say this for him, when Ricky’s daughter Peggy showed up in cast-off clothes, without a penny, he did adopt her. And left everything to her.”

“Was she tall, thin, gray-eyed?”

“Yes! Where did you see her? We’ve put all the photographs away, along with Tom’s fencing trophies and the stereo.”

I wasn’t about to get into the revenant I’d seen on the train. Instead, I asked, “What about Tom, does he know?”

“Miss Zinnia told him when he turned twenty-one. And he wanted to go straight to the lawyers and give Carla half the house and property.” 

Though there was absolutely no reason for it, warmth flooded me.

Lissa went on. “But as Carla had never married, nor did she want to, she refused, saying it would only come back to him anyway.” She gave a last quick tug, twitched a curl, and lifted her hands. “There you go. Take a look—what do you think?”

She held up a mirror. I stared at my face, startled at how changed it was with my hair piled up on my head, with curls falling picturesquely on my shoulder.

“Geez,” Phoebe said from behind. “You look just like that painting on the landing.”

I turned around. “About ten shades browner.”

Phoebe shrugged a shoulder. “Makes you ten times better looking.”

“I’ll get the book back to the library,” Lissa said briskly. “You had better go get dressed. The wagon is due any time.”

I’d laughed off Phoebe’s wry compliment, but I was still feeling good about myself as I went up to put on the gown. It fell around me in graceful folds, the silk whispering over the stairs as I trod carefully down in a cheap pair of ballet slippers that Kate had among the costume paraphernalia, for people who didn’t own their own period footwear. I was grateful that verisimilitude did not extend to the hideously pointed toes of the period any more than it did to the wearing of heavy wigs or loads of powder, except for the footmen, and they apparently knew about the wigs going in.

I was unsure where I was to be during the day, so I paused on the landing beside Barbara’s portrait. Then Tom’s voice floated up the stairs. “Perdita? There you are. Come help me welcome the guests.”

I lifted my skirts carefully and tripped down, to find him waiting at the foot of the stair, looking at me with that unnervingly direct gaze, his lips parted.

My nerves flashed fire as our eyes met. He could have stepped down from a Revolutionary period portrait gallery, with his fine hair drawn back into a queue, the ruffled shirt and blue silk coat that matched his eyes. His waistcoat was embroidered with tiny poppies, and I wondered if it, too, was an antique, like my gown. He looked as if he’d worn such clothes all his life.

Below his slender waist were blue knee-length trousers. The costume was completed by white stockings and buckled shoes; he drew a foot back and with a graceful flourish made a leg. “My lady.”

I curtseyed low, hoping when I came up that my blush would look like make-up as I said, “My lord! Um. Wait. What year are we, exactly? Is it officially a republic—no titles?”

He laughed, held out his arm with an air, and as I placed my fingertips just above the fine lace at his turned-back cuffs, he said, “It shall be whenever you like. Perdita, you look wonderful—” He began as we strolled to the open front door.

We were prevented from further speech by the rhythmic jingling coming up the driveway. The wagon had arrived, the horses’ ribbons fluttering bravely . . . happy voices from the wagon vanished under the low rumble of an engine.

Driving slowly behind the wagon was the Cunninghams’ vintage Rolls.  

But as its driver pulled it modestly farther up the sweep, the rumbling from behind it resolved into the Ferrari, as Ogden Van Spurter the ninth or tenth roared up, brilliantly decked out in gold satin, with a white wig and a tricorne on his head.

Van had taken up that standing invitation.

* * *

Whatever Tom was going to say was forgotten. He withdrew behind that air of polite courtesy, but close as I stood, I could see his pulse beating in the hollow of his temple.

There was absolutely no sign of anything but a genial eighteenth century host as he welcomed all the wagon guests by name.

The footmen raced out to fetch belongings. Jason, dressed as the butler, bowed everyone in, waving them either to the billiards room or the small room beside it, now the ladies’ drawing room, where refreshments awaited, beautifully arranged by Phoebe and Prue, and tended by Jennifer, fetching in her fluffy cap and dimity apron. Her curtseys were as natural and perfect as if she’d been doing them all her life.

Van waited until last. When he stepped up onto the terrace in the wake of the last couple, he doffed his hat, grinned, and said in a low rumble to Tom, “Look, forget what I said the other day. If you sign the house over tomorrow, I’ve got my dad to agree not to knock it down. You and I will go over it ourselves. A room at a time, a hectare at a time on the land. Treasure or no treasure, we’ll have the ball next year, just the same, only it’ll be me as host. You’ll have enough money to go back to England, or start a fencing school, or whatever you want. Fair?”

Jason appeared in a positively Jeevesian manner, holding out a tray of glasses filled with lemonade as he said loudly, “Care for refreshments, sir?”

Maybe he was coming to Tom’s rescue, but the latter merely stepped back slightly, to permit Van to take a glass of lemonade, then said in perfect English diction, “And how do our friends at West Point?”

Reminding Van that this was a period event—but was there also an oblique hint at Benedict Arnold there?

From the way Van flushed to the edge of his impressive George Washington wig, he certainly took it that way. Tom then extended a hand invitingly, and followed his unexpected guest inside.

I had stepped back, out of notice. My plan was to stick to the perimeter and be decorative, but as the guests were gradually guided outside to the terrace on the other side of the house, under the shade of the spreading oak, my eyes caught a flutter of flame red just beyond the garden.

A butterfly? I blinked, and the gold-glinting ruddiness resolved into bouncing curls. At first I thought it was Ellie running through the garden, but Ellie was tall and willowy, her hair the warm red of henna. This girl was petite, maybe twenty at most. Her lacy muslin gown frothed about her slippers as she halted, poised on her toes, and looked back; a tall, dark-haired guy in a military blue coat ran arms outstretched to catch her. I saw his dark queue bouncing against the broadcloth of his coat. A rippling laugh escaped her, melodic as a summer bird, as she took off again, skimming lightly over the grass.

They had to be Eleanor Shipley and Richard Grahame—either right before their marriage, or not long after. They vanished beyond the wild riot of sumac bordering the garden fence, beyond which I caught sight of Carla walking the horses to the barn to get them out of the traces and make sure they were watered after their six miles in the hot sun.

Carla. I hoped that Lissa had remembered to get that old book back to the library. It had to be rare, certainly an heirloom, however useless its earnest message about needy girls, and—

 _There’s need._ As I watched the sober-faced Carla vanish beyond the hedgerow that hid the barn from view, the phrase surfaced from early memory, in _Abuelita’s_ dear voice. “There’s need,” she would say, and instantly put aside whatever she was doing. When I was a kid, I seldom knew what she went in aid of—kids get used to adults whizzing off on mysterious errands that they won’t explain, but you get that heart-squeezing sense from their pressed lips, their distracted eyes, that they are worried, that they aren’t quite in control of everything.

My mother had hated it when _Abuelita_ said, “There’s need,” and went instantly to help. _Why does she have to rush off to take care of every loser in the universe? Who put her in charge of the world?_ Sometimes when _Abuelita_ returned, Mom would light into her, voice rising . . .

I’d suppressed those memories, but the phrase came back now: _There’s need_. Carla had given me that book, the single other person who’d seen these ghosts. According to Abraham Potter, ghosts came when needed, and it was then, as the wagon disappeared from view, that I finally saw the obvious. No one had told me what Barbara Grahame’s ghost had said to Carla, but as the guests settled expectantly onto the low balustrade, the carved benches, and a few oval-backed chairs set on the lawn under the trees, I began to put together the clues.

A ten year old kid is alone in a barn on Christmas Eve, fifty-some years ago, when it had to be freezing cold. It couldn’t be for any good reason. A ghost comes to visit her. To comfort her? Because . . . was it then that Carla had found out the circumstances of her birth?

 Directly under the oak gathered the local church choir, all dressed in costume. They began singing a series of French airs _a capella_ , romantic, poignant, sorrowful and sweet, as Jason kept the lemonade coming. I stood where I had stopped on the terrace while I sorted the many thoughts streaming through my mind. There was something important here, a butterfly I was running to catch.

I blinked. Tom stood across the garden from me, his head tilted toward the singers, whose voices blended beautifully, rising and falling in the nimble triplets characteristic of melodies at that time. But I sensed his attention everywhere—yes, I saw his seemingly lazy eyelids flickering minutely. He watched them all: the singers, the guests enjoying the lemonade and the spiked punch that the footmen were now bringing out. The progress of the tiny tartlets on their trays. He watched Van, sitting in the front, arms crossed over his powerful chest, one buckled shoe twitching up and down, the diamante in the buckles throwing brilliant sparkles of sun upward. He was as tense as Tom.

 _There’s need_. Did Tom know about that book? No, wrong question. Though I had barely known him a day, and only spoken twice, somehow I was certain he knew every old book in their library, hitherto barely glimpsed by me. The question to ask was why Carla (and Lissa?) thought the book would help _me_. I began to appreciate the way it had been offered to me, in so casual a way there was no sense of obligation.

But there was a need.

My gaze went to Van sitting there, staring into space, his foot twitching up and down the way that people do when impatient, or nervous. Or angry. Did he mean what he said, he would keep the house instead of razing it? Maybe he meant it at the time; maybe he was told what to say. Or maybe he would keep its shell, and tear down all that beautiful molding, the delicate silken wallpaper in the side parlor, the old books and the grandfather clock, and he’d bring in modern decorators and up-to-date tech toys. Three days ago I would have thought nothing wrong with such a scenario, but here . . . the idea was so viscerally horrible it was nearly a violation of spirit. Carla, Lissa, Kate . . . they knew it. _I’m desperate_ , Tom had said.

_There’s need._

The Learned Abraham Potter had said that trying to force the ghosts to come was counter-productive. I could corroborate that from experience. So how does a person try to summon them _without_ trying?

Something was missing, some last crucial element or insight that seemed to hover just out of reach. I breathed out again, closing my eyes. Letting myself take in the scents of summer: grass, roses, the elusive aroma of apple blossoms, the heady fumes of whisky spiking the punch. I felt the fretful breeze that was beginning to rise. A storm coming? Not important. Breathe, breathe. Sounds: the harmonic partnership of music and soughing leaves overhead.

Liminal . . . mood . . .harmonic . . . _Almost, almost_.

The singers finished, to be replaced by a trio playing period instruments who began with some Mozart airs; the musical tinkle of crystal on silver; light voices, laughter. The fitful breeze whooshed through the treetops. My attention kept getting sidetracked. I needed to get away from the crowd.

I wandered the perimeter of the garden, and headed up toward the orchard. _Time, mood_ ; I lifted my head and gazed through the dappled shadows toward the gate . . . and there was a lone figure in a streaming cloak, riding a black horse. The woman riding glanced around so quickly that her light gray hood fell back. I had just enough time to recognize Barbara Grahame before the horse vanished beyond a fold in the landscape . . . and was gone.

Gray cloak. Hair done up in the manner of a married woman rather than loose ringlets of an unmarried young lady. Riding eastward, with intent.

Mood—mine, of nervous intent, impending trouble. Barbara’s mood? I walked to the gate and leaned on it, my insides tight with conviction, not quite joy. I was onto something. Okay, so what mood patterns could be identified?

I turned around to look through the swaying branches at the house, its two great chimneys and the rows of long windows. I’d seen glimpses of that house being built, and moments in the lives of its inhabitants: _love_. Not only romantic love, but love in one’s art, love of the sunlight on a quiet spring day, love of dancing in the ballroom, love between people, between generations.

Those revenants were like moments of love imprinted on the air.

“Hey. Perdita.”

I turned, careful of the gown. Phoebe stood there, looking like a revenant herself in her mob cap, old-fashioned smock shirt with the big apron over it, and blue skirt beneath—except there were her motorcycle boots below. I found the sight of those oddly steadying as she jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Look,” she said. “I know it’s none of my business, but everybody is running around like crazy, so I didn’t know who else to tell. I just collected a bunch of dirty plates from the front parlor, and caught sight of the suit in the pool table room, rapping on the walls.”

‘The suit’ would be Van, looking for the treasure room, of course. _Tom isn’t the only one who’s desperate._

“I’ll deal,” I said.

She gave me a sharp shrug and retreated in the direction of the kitchen. I lifted my skirts so the hem wouldn’t get grass stains and cut a straight line through the orchard, wondering how best to ‘deal.’

Simple is best, I thought as I stepped onto the terrace from the far side of the oak. Half the guests had gone inside, leaving some listening to the trio, others conversing, clearly regarding the three as background music. Tom was just coming around the verandah from the front; the way his chin lifted, I could sense that he’d seen me.

I was going to wave . . .no. Certainly not shout. Nor rush up to him and start whispering. Then I remembered what I’d seen the day before, specifically the childhood ghosts of Barbara and her brother with that mean-faced tutor. _I will bet anything Tom not only knows about their secret foot code, he probably even knows the code_ , I thought, and so I lifted my skirt just a little, and kicked myself in the ankle in the warning gesture I’d witnessed the day before.

And sure enough, his brows went up. “Where?” he mouthed the word.

“Study,” I said voicelessly.

“Thanks.” He half-lifted a hand, backtracked a step, and vanished again around the front of the house, leaving me with that inner glow.

Maybe I could back him up if Van tried anything. Without further defining to myself what Van might try (or what I’d do if he did) I slipped in through the French doors to the ballroom, surprising Kate, looking fetching in her maid’s gown, putting the finishing touches to the vases of roses that she’d picked that morning. She pointed through the doors on the other side of the ballroom, that led to the main hall. They were open, to encourage the passage of air; through the equally open door of the study came the sound of male voices.

As I crossed, silent in my slippers, the voices resolved into distinguishable words.

“. . . and here is the catch. You probably would not have found this daisy, at least we didn’t until, oh, two or three summers after you were here. And here you are—the treasure room. Without, I fear, any treasure. Enos saw to that fifty years ago.”

“What was in here?” Van’s voice boomed.

“In those days? Fragile glassware. Old letters and journals. Yes, we’ve been through them all, and no, there is no mention of treasure. Peaceable Drummond Sherwood stopped keeping a journal when he returned to England, shortly before his uncle died. His letters were confined to family reports.”

“There must be something in code,” Van said. “He and Grahame were famous for hiding the truth in codes.”

“If there is any code about treasure, it vanished. Van, why are you here? Why not show up tomorrow in your Ferrari, trailing lawyers? You must be as hot a blazes in that wig. Unless you really do intend to challenge me to swords at dawn?”

Van’s answer was totally unexpected. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you.” It wasn’t even a question. With a ragged laugh, he said, “But if letting you whack me with that sword of yours would get you to sign over the house and property before tomorrow, then name your place and time.”

“I should not like that in the least,” Tom said gently. “I take it your father issued threats to you, too? I will say this for him, he’s consistent.”

“If you sell to me, then I get half. If he has to go through the lawyers, then he keeps whatever’s left, and I have to wait.”

“I’m sorry you find yourself in that position.”

“Dad says there is a moral imperative here. Our family never did get paid for those defensive arms.”

“Ordered by whom? There was no government with that right,” Tom answered, still gently. “I wonder how many times a moral imperative has translated out to personal wish?”

Van walked out.

I slipped into the hallway in time to see his retreating back vanish onto the terrace through the open front door. Behind me, the grandfather clock ticked reassuringly; I stepped into the study, not knowing what to say.

Tom paused with his hand on what had to be the treasure room door. “Perdita?”

The sudden hope in his face hurt me. _He isn't thinking of you_ , Mom whispered in my head. _He’s hoping you've found the treasure._

But he hasn’t said so, I answered back. And to Tom, “Have the ghosts ever been seen in there?”

“I don’t know. Take a look, if you like.”

I stepped up beside him—and not three paces from me was Peaceable, impeccable in a light brown driving cape, and Barbara in a rose-colored morning gown. Framed against an inlaid cabinet, they stood hand in hand.

“You see something?” Tom asked.

I blinked, and as usual, they vanished. “I did. But they were just holding hands. Peaceable and Barbara, that is. She was in the process of lifting a chain from around her neck, on which hung a ring.”

“Did they speak?” Tom asked curiously. I was very aware of the fact that he stood as close to me as Barbara had to Peaceable. Amazing, how very much alike the two men were, ancestor and descendant, in certain ways, though I could have pointed out a hundred tiny differences. They tipped their heads with the exact air of dreamy courtesy—I am convinced either of them would have looked the same if mounting the gallows.

Or, to be more realistic, Tom would look the same way if forced to sign over his house.

“No,” I said, with difficulty recovering the subject; my gaze took in the neatly stacked boxes of electric clocks, two radios, a stereo set, a TV, some modern-looking table lamps. Set against the inner wall, another box full of trophies; I made out the shape of a fencer in one, glinting silver.

No ghosts obligingly appeared. I was too caught up in the moment, too aware of Tom standing almost within arm’s reach.

The words _I’m sorry_ formed behind my lips, but I knew how he’d hate their futility, and so I said, “Richard and Barbara were doing the foot code in one of the rooms upstairs.”

“I was going to ask who told you that.” Tom smiled ruefully as I walked out of the treasure room, and he slid the panel closed. “It’s been passed down through the family at my end. My brother and I found it, ah, handy, as it were, when we were small. Did you come in here seeking ghosts, or to defend my honor?” Tom asked with quiet self-mockery.

“From the looks of those trophies in there, you can do that on your own.” I thought of Kate fussing with the flowers ten paces away, and Phoebe of all people, running up to the orchard to enlist my help. I said more seriously, “But it seems to me there are people here who want to defend the house.”

“You saw Kate, then? What did she have, a fireplace poker? Half an hour ago, I was talking Paul out of letting the tires out of the Ferrari. Between the glee singers and the trio, Jason sidled up with his drink tray and said that if I wanted him to shove Van into the cellar hole, lock him up, and ransom him to his dad, he and the MacIntosh boys were up for it.”

Tom flashed his brilliant smile. Then he sobered. “But I don’t think Van is contemplating mayhem. He feels he has to look, to listen, and above all to convince me.” Tom lifted a shoulder. “So . . . I showed him the treasure room. I figured if he does get the place, maybe he’d be less likely to hack the wall down searching.”

“I don’t feel any sympathy for him.”

“Nobody does. Even Pat. But then he’s never seen Van around his father.”

So Tom at least had shared this awful situation with his brother. “You said Pat can't afford lawyers.”

“True, but Pat is not without his resources. Even if our combined efforts prove to be a stall, rather than a solution, we will try to spare our parents as long as we can.”

When we reached the ballroom, I could feel Tom slipping into host mode again.

I kept walking straight to the orchard, thinking about the household, and love, and its strength. But can strength prevail against power, specifically the power of the will backed by a hefty wallet?

 _Abuelita_ whispered in memory, _‘Love is stronger than anything.’_

_Abuelita, if it’s true, why can’t you come to me, and tell me what to do?_

No answer.

* * *

 

The breeze had kicked up into a wind. The light changed, glare bright, as the last of the afternoon entertainments ended and the guests came in to change for dinner and the ball.

I didn’t think about what Van’s sudden appearance would do to the carefully arranged table organization until we gathered in the parlor off the dining room. What would they do about an extra man?

The answer appeared among the pretty velvets and flowered silks of the gathering guests. Wearing her gorgeous silver and white princess gown was Madison, a headdress fashioned out of white roses and ribbons on her profusion of curls instead of the despised mob cap. She was easily the youngest female there: I think the average age was fifty.

When Madison saw me, her nervous grin changed to relief, so I walked up to join her.

“I’m now Van’s dinner partner,” she whispered. “When I brought my dress, I thought I was going to be that Barbara Grahame. The one who married some English Lord a million years ago, after she tended the punch bowl. But if you are being her, who should I be? In case Van is being Colonel Van Spurter, and knows all that military history.”

“How about being a visitor from somewhere like New York, or Philadelphia. That way, if he really wants to talk about history, he won’t expect you to know Revolutionary war details.”

She grinned, opened a beautiful silver fan, and gently fluttered it without disarranging her hair. “That is _such_ a good idea.” Her cheerleader confidence was back. “One thing I do know: guys really like mansplaining, whether it's sports, politics, or history.”

Jason appeared at the double doors then, and announce that dinner was served. Most of the older men held out an arm to the nearest woman, long practiced in the etiquette of the formal dinner. With great assurance, Madison sailed up to Van’s side and slid her hand through his arm, smiling up at him. “I’m your dinner partner.”

“Should I call you Miss or your ladyship?” Van said.

“Now how am I to answer that?” she cooed, giving him the double-barreled through-the-eyelashes look.

A step at my side, and my nerves sang. I knew it was Tom before I met the full impact of his smile. “That,” he murmured, “piece of brilliance was concocted between Kate and Ellie. They have put him at the far end of the table, next to Mrs. Cunningham.”

 “Perfect.”

“Uh oh.” He glanced to one side. I followed that glance, and saw his dilemma. In the old days, everyone would have lined up behind in strict rank order, taking their time if the lead lady shuffled slowly the way Mrs. Cunningham did.

But these days, rank was harder to define, and people passed into the dining room in any order. Ellie’s dad was deep in conversation with a couple he obviously knew, leaving old Mrs. Cunningham standing there with rickety Doctor Lewis and his wife. The elderly doctor clearly wasn’t stable enough on his feet to escort two ladies—that is, and arrive before winter.

“Do you mind?” Tom asked, and when I shook my head, he moved to take Mrs. Cunningham’s arm.

At that moment, Mr. Shipley reappeared, looking chagrined. When he saw me heading over to follow Tom and Mrs. Cunningham, he came to me with a polite apology and a smile, and so I was escorted to my place at Tom’s right. There was my name card, _Perdita Gutierrez_ , spelled correctly.

When I looked around, I discovered that Van had done some adroit quarterbacking on his own: with the greatest assurance of the world, he had swapped out Doctor Lewis and his wife, placing them at the other end of the table next to Mrs. Cunningham.

A moment later, I heard Doctor Lewis’s quavering voice, “Ah, this is very fine, next to my old friend Doris Cunningham.”

At that moment, Tom was carefully adjusting the chair for the elderly lady. Over her head, his rueful gaze met mine.

Van turned my way. “Miss Gutierrez? My name’s Van Spurter. Call me Van. Your father’s people any relation to Senator Gutierrez?”

“No,” I said, as Tom quietly took his seat. “My mother’s people are all in Arizona. They’ve been there since the days of Alta California. My father’s name was Grant Richards.”

During the speech, Van’s gaze had flickered from me to Tom. I don’t think he was listening to me at all. But Tom was.

As the footmen began bringing the food and drinks out, as beautifully choreographed and practiced as the dance about to begin, Van broke eighteenth century etiquette by offering a toast before the meal. “To our respected ancestors, our present company, and our future success!”

It was well-thought out, and the table chimed in, though Mrs. Cunningham harrumphed, and muttered about how in the old days, ladies did not toast. That sort of thing was done by the gentlemen, after the ladies had withdrawn.

I think that nonplussed Van a little; he was quiet as the first course was brought out by the well-rehearsed footmen.

I strongly suspect Van had been mapping out some kind of verbal campaign, but whatever it was, he had not counted on two things: first, the exhibition dance, and second, Maddie.

As soon as the first course had been served, the octet struck up their prelude from the ballroom adjacent, and in came the dancers, hands held high in pretty arcs. They promenaded around the table, and then, in an amazing display of grace and adaptation to a confining space, proceeded to dance around us as we ate.

It was wonderful to watch—and nobody could get a word in edgewise.

When the dance ended, the footmen paraded out to collect the dirty plates and to bring on the next course. Maddie flirted her fan, flicked back her hair, and launched into a sequence of flattering questions, not only keeping Van’s attention firmly on herself, but also that of the only other young guy, who happened to be across the table.

My gaze met Tom’s. His eyes were not lazy at all as they laughed over the rim of his wine goblet. He sipped, set it down—

And a slender hand similar to his own set a wine goblet down on the table. Not the ordinary faux-crystal stemware we were using, but glass that gleamed like a cut ruby, with a snake twined round its stem. And the table was a bare, polished palimpsest set a couple inches from the present snowy tablecloth.

Ghosts.

Four people sat at my end of the long table, the tall dark-haired man within my reach, his face turned toward the petite copper-haired lady who leaned against him so all I could see was the back of his head. This had to be Richard Grahame and his Eleanor. Across the table sat Peaceable and Barbara, the former setting down his glass.

The four were mostly shadowy figures, planes of their faces and golden pinpoints in eyes illuminated by a single candle set between them. Each had a different wine glass fashioned in the manner of old Venice: the emerald one with a dolphin twining around it, the blue one with birds chasing around the stem, wingtip to wingtip, and one of a brilliant yellow, blossoms winding up its stem.

Incongruously, the elegant wine glasses were accompanied by an unmatched set of dishware, as if someone had grabbed whatever was handy, and the food that they fell upon so hungrily was bread and cheese, the bread cut by a military dagger laid on the table next to the candle.

“Who would ever have guessed that serving as county laughingstock would prove so very convenient?” That had to be Richard, that tone of near laughter.

Barbara handed Peaceable a spray of berries, then leaned over to kiss him as he retorted with good humor, “Or as villain? _Quid non mortalia cogis_ —”

“— _auri sacra fames_ ,” Richard retorted. “Spare me your Vergil. I ache enough without the reminder of MacTavish’s switch.” He rubbed his arm, and what I had taken to be a shadow was revealed to be a streak of dirt along his blue sleeve.

Dirt also streaked the ruffled shirt cuffs falling over Peaceable’s wrists as he put a hand to the pocket of his coat. “I believe,” said Peaceable, “there is a smut on your cheek, dearest.” His voice was a light tenor, musical, slow and sleepy.

“Botheration,” Barbara said, but she sat still as he leaned over, and with a snowy white, lace-edged handkerchief, blotted the mud from her cheek, his gesture one of tender concentration.

Eleanor laughed. “I shall put water on the hob myself, and we can all get a wash.”

“But first, to a job well done,” Richard said, raising his glass—

Then something caught their attention, for Peaceable’s fingers pressed over Barbara’s as all four of them swiveled toward the east windows.

A flourish of violins, and the ghosts were gone. Out came the dancers for their second set, and I stared down at the wine goblet I’d unheedingly knocked over.

Van gave me a puzzled frown.

“Excuse me,” I managed. “I’m so clumsy.”

Van’s attention turned away, but I felt Tom’s gaze, and then a shoe pressed against mine. I moved my foot automatically, then remembered the code. And moved it back.

YOU WELL?

Did I remember all the letters?

GOSTS, I responded, not sure how to do H.

He sent a startled glance at me. ?

FOUR, R E P B.  ALARM!

I was scarcely aware of the dancers as I scowled at my wineglass, striving to recover that vision.

When I glanced up, Van was watching me again. I focused determinedly on the dancers as I tried to contain my impatience. I wanted to talk, but what could Tom actually do? I couldn’t explain how I saw these things, only that I saw them.

I didn’t witness much beyond a few steps of that fabulous dance as I tried mentally to retrace every moment.

When everyone burst into clapping, I nearly jumped. The dancers bowed—the musicians took a break—the footmen came out to remove the plates. I had barely touched my slice of roast with new potatoes and fresh peas—I watched it go away with a sense of regret.

Conversation started up. Maddie had firm command of Van’s attention, though he kept trying to listen as Tom and I talked about books, music, and history. It was strange—it felt so much like we’d always known one another, even though we were running through our favorite books with _Have you read. . ._? and _What did you think of . . .?_

Too soon came the next course, and another dance. Finally it was time for dessert, Apple Brown Betty sprinkled with brandy and a spoonful of cream. After that, Tom stood up and offered the toasts in semi-proper form as the ladies did not actually withdraw. And then it was time for the ball to open.

Chairs scraped. All across the windows blue light flickered. Glass tinkled as someone dropped a cup. Every face turned toward the long windows, beyond which the trees tossed in a rising wind. As yet the lightning was far away, briefly silhouetting the hills.

The octet played a short flourish, and with laughter and commentary, the dinner guests began to cross to the ballroom, where the new arrivals crowded in.

“Ooh, is that Van?” At the front of the newcomers was Emma, stunning in a Civil War crinoline. At her side, a pretty blonde in a Mary Tudor gown. “Mad! You got to wear your Cinderella gown!”

“I’m Van’s dinner partner. How cool is that?”

Emma took up a station on Van’s other side, and looked up him flirtatiously, eyes laughing over her fluttering fan. “You’re going to dance with us _all_.”

Van flushed and grinned back.

Tom was on the other side of the ballroom, greeting the new guests.

Kate appeared, motioning me to my station. The heavy scent of spiced and citrus-flavored claret surrounded me as I peered through the cracks in the screen, the vivid colors of the guests rippled with stately glory back and forth under the flattering candle light. The octet played on, violins cascading us with brilliant cadenzas. Here I was again in luminal space and time: in the ballroom but not part of it, suspended between the past and the now.

Methodically I began to dip the ladle and fill the ranks of cups. When the first dance ended, the guests started appearing, thirsty enough to dare the old-fashioned claret punch, which at least had been thoroughly chilled.

As soon as the next dance started up, I was alone again, besieged by questions I could not answer: what happened to startle the four? When was it in relation to all the other events of their lives? And why was I _hearing_ ghosts for the first time ever?

Someone came to collect the used cups and then to bring them back washed. When the opening between my screen and the wall darkened again, I didn’t look up until Tom murmured, “What did you see?”

I looked up, my nerves singing. As Tom began methodically dumping punch from the untouched glasses back into the bowl, I filled him in on that impromptu meal with the four ghosts, and finished, “Um, not to criticize, but why are you dumping the punch back and filling the cups again?”

He flashed his quick, rueful grin. “It gives me something to be doing, the officious host showing the hapless punch girl how to pour it properly. You know Van will be here any moment—he’s been watching me. Which direction did they look in, do you remember?”

I pointed. “It was that way. Very clear.”

He turned his head, and though there was nothing but wall and the edge of the first of the long windows, he paused, then his eyes widened. “The old gate, during the horse and carriage days.” He set the ladle down, and leaned against the table, one elegant hand lifting toward the window. “Shall we?”

“Yes.” I glanced around. “Let me just tie something around my head. I don’t want to walk back in looking like a demented witch—it’s sure to cause questions.”

“You could never look like a demented witch.”

He said it lightly, and I answered with a laugh, but the steady gaze that accompanied it made me feel candlelit from the inside. As he stealthily pushed the far edge of the screen to reveal the right-hand French door, I picked up the folded tablecloth waiting behind me in case of spills, and whipped it around my head like a shawl.

Grinning over his shoulder at me, Tom eased the door open, and we escaped, protected from general view by my screen.

The wind scoured along the terrace, hot and electric. I clutched my makeshift shawl with one hand and gathered my skirts in the other as he leaned close. “This way—they won’t see us if we slip over the terrace wall by the tree.”

Strong as the wind was on the terrace, as soon as we left its relative protection, the full blast nearly took me off my feet. Tom gripped my arm, steadying me. I dropped my skirts, which promptly began to flag like a ship under sail, and tied the tablecloth firmly under my chin. This enabled me to hold both sides of my skirts. A nod at him—his pupils were wide and back, a tiny reflection of the long bank of golden windows in them as he watched over my shoulder—and we fought our way into the wind until we reached the other side of the barn.

A distant flash of lightning briefly illumined a secondary kitchen garden. Stepping over the homely rows of cabbage, we headed for a ghostly gate, then I froze, stiffening, and Tom let go of my arm. Maybe he thought I was protesting his touch, but I couldn't talk, I couldn't move, for directly in front of me stood a dark-haired man in a glorious brocade housecoat, his back to me. His stance was distinctive: already I recognized Richard Grahame just by his attitude

He gazed up at a tall, broad-chested man on horseback. Moonlight revealed an impressive wig under a tricorne gleaming with gold braid and stiffened lace. Equally grand was his buff-and-blue uniform, with enormous gold epaulettes on either shoulder. “Well, Dick?”

Richard drawled, “Sputters. I thought you might be along, but really? In the middle of the night?”

“Where is he, Dickie?”

“Where is who?”

Ogden Van Spurter made an impatient movement, which caused his horse to flatten its ears and sidle. He reined it in hard as he said, “Fiend seize it, you know who I mean. My scouts chased the devil Sherwood to this very district, and someone said you’d found him and his pack of rascals. I don’t like to blow my own horn, but even the village idiot could see no prisoners being guarded in this barn, no perimeter, no sentries. And surely you would not put them in your house. So where are they?”

“Just like the bad old days, eh, Sputters? I can show you our bruises and contusions, but as for actual bodies, the best I can give you is that we drove them off. Ask Hobson, whose arm is broken in two places. He chased them clear down to Schuyler Creek before he fainted. As for the perimeter and sentries, they are at the boundary of my land. I also have the house under constant watch, I assure you.”

“I’ll reinforce your watch, then—after I look through that house, if you will honor me with permission.”

“I honor your interest, but as it happens I do not want anyone tramping through the house at this time of night. It desolates me to inform you, but the other rumors I find quite dismaying are those coming from the locals, of marauding by you and your men.”

“Marauding! I am on a military mission, and it is the duty of all good patriots to lend us their aid and support. Now, Grahame, I'd as lief not be distracted from my task. Are you going to permit me and my men to search this house and grounds, or must I report to the governor that you refused? Forcing us to assume that you are harboring an enemy.”

“I thought the peace was signed two years ago. Fancy us not knowing that a new war has been declared.”

Van Spurter said between shut teeth, “We chased them here. To your land.”

“And we chased them off.”

“Seeing as your sister is married to their commander, and she was reported seen riding about, may I take leave to doubt your . . . observations? I mean to search this house. And the grounds.”

“By all means,” Richard said, raising his hand in a lazy gesture of welcome. “But not before dawn. I won’t permit anyone to ransack my house in the dark, upsetting the servants and endangering Eleanor and the child.”

“By dawn they could be halfway to Canada. Or New York, or Philadelphia.”

“In such a case,” Richard said humorously, “shouldn’t you be hot on their trail? We think they rode east—”

 “I am going to search every deuced house, outhouse, barn, and hayrick in this county,” Van Spurter retorted angrily.

Richard’s response was weary. “You have already upset half the valley. I assure you, Sputters, as one who once was your friend: if you carry on like this, by noon tomorrow you will have every man who can carry a musket out guarding his own, not against the devil Sherwood, but against _you_.”

Van Spurter wrenched his horse around—lightning flared, blinding us—and a cold gust of wind ripped at my face as Van shouted from close by, “ _There_ you are.”

He stood a few feet away; another, closer flash of lightning revealed him holding his wig on as he looked from Tom to me and back again.

“I came to ask Miss Gutierrez to dance,” he shouted against the wind. “She shouldn’t have to stand in the corner alone all night. I didn’t know you two are . . .” He stopped, and pointed his free hand between us.

What had he seen? The two of us standing in the middle of the cabbage patch, staring at nothing. As I thought that, Tom’s arm slid around me. Suppressing a laugh (and a shiver that had nothing to do with the sudden burst of cold wind) I leaned against him, miming a pair who escaped for a little private flirting.

Lightning—closer still. A few seconds later thunder rumbled, slow and ragged. The storm was on the way.

“I would love to dance with you,” I said, lifting my voice over the howl of the wind under the eaves of the barn, and the hissing, soughing thrash of the apple trees.

“And I would love to watch you dancing. Let’s all get inside before the storm bursts,” Tom said.

Van closed on my other side. Was he really looking for me, or was this an excuse to corner Tom? The thought of his having developed a disinterested kindness for me vanished totally when he said over my head, “Tom, you’re going to have to talk to me, and without all this history fakery. I’ll wait all night if I have to.”

Blinding light crackled, then thunder cracked directly overhead.

Big fat raindrops hit my face as we ran; the three of us leaped onto the terrace a heartbeat before the skies opened. The rain was so sudden and so hard it splashed back up a couple of feet. Van leaped back, sending an annoyed look at Tom, so he didn’t see a tall, shadowy figure slip from the barn and run for the house. A slant of golden glow from the first window briefly lit Carla’s profile before she vanished in the direction of the kitchen.

Tom opened the ballroom door—and the wind snatched it away. One of the footmen caught it before it could crash and shatter; as wind swirled into the ballroom, fluttering the women’s dresses and blowing cool air over damp, red faces, the octet faltered in their playing, and dancers halted, looking around.

Madison laughed. “This is so _awesome!”_

This was one moment when electricity would probably had failed, going out, but the candles flickered, streamed, and steadied.

The octet struck up again, and with smiles, some worried glances at the windows lighting dramatically with blue-white glare, and the world-shaking tumult of thunder, the dancers resumed their places. I untied the tablecloth and refolded it, laying it on a chair as Tom was surrounded with guests.

Muffling an exasperated sigh, Van turned my way, and held out his hand.

I was frantic to tell Tom what I'd seen, but I mustered a smile and tripped daintily forward as if I had nothing on my mind but flirtation. I’d learned the basic minuet step long ago, so I pointed my toes and lifted my hand, wrist arced, ready to observe whatever variation had become the norm here.

Van took his place with a decidedly unflirtatious air of impatience. The music began. As we minced in the grapevine step of the lead-in figure, Van said, “I know I haven’t met you before this, but why do you seem familiar? Were you and Tom an item in college, is that it?”

I’d already resolved that I wasn’t going to talk about Tom at all with this guy. “You may ask the gentleman,” I said over my shoulder as we promenaded in the Z. “It is his place to tell as much or as little as he wishes.”

“Oh, come on,” Van muttered. “All I want to know is if you’ll help me to convince him to see reason. I’m really on his side, he’s just too stubborn to see it.”

“The only thing I am sure of is that I’ve no wish to poke my nose where it isn’t wanted,” I said hypocritically, and as we did the two-hand circle in seeming amity, I looked around for scowling and finger-pointing ghosts. I was, by my own efforts, as deep in the matter as could be.

But Van didn’t know it. He spent the rest of the dance reiterating all the stuff I’d already heard him throwing at Tom, only in more polite form, with frequent additions of “ . . . so you can tell him that . . .” and “ . . . I want him to understand that . . .”

I nodded, smiled, curtseyed, minced, and we finished, again, with the greatest affect of politesse he bowed and I curtseyed. Then we parted with what I suspect was mutual levels of relief.

After which we both looked around for Tom—me covertly, he obviously, but if Van had planned to corner Tom then, he was frustrated because Tom was heading straight toward me. And we joined the country dance now starting up.

Van couldn’t have cornered Tom without rudeness as he was promptly surrounded by his lady admirers, one of whom claimed his hand. Determined as he was to hound Tom about that sale, he was not single-minded, or at least not proof against a crowd of pretty girls. He and his new partner got into line a safe three or four couples behind us, so Tom said, “Did you see them? Hear them?”

I filled him in quickly, ending, “Today is the first time I ever saw ghosts for such long periods, or heard them speak,” I returned, and studied him doubtfully. In spite of his customary air of elegant heedlessness, I could see subtle signs of stress in his taut forehead, in the shadows at the corners of his mouth, and so, in a tumble of low words, each time we came together in the dance, I shared my guesses.

He listened without scorn, dubiousness, or disbelief. After we’d progressed around the circle, he said, “Time. Place. Mood—we were defensive, Richard was defensive, and proximity? Do you think if we touched, it might strengthen whatever it is that permits you to see?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This is new territory for me.”

Tom flashed a smile as we parted to do hands-across with our right-hand partners respectively, and when we came together again, he said, “So what we know is that Barbara went riding. Peaceable and his men and Richard’s and his must have met somewhere close by. Something happened, something that caused the four to be spattered in mud, celebrating, late at night.”

“Burying treasure,” I said.

He let out his breath. “Only when? Where? What happened? We need to see it. We.” He blinked, and gave me a searching gaze. “Perdita, is this a trespass? Do you feel taken advantage of?”

There was no time for anything but honesty. “I want to solve this as much as you do.”

As we finished a turn, he brought up my hand and kissed it.

* * *

We only had the one dance, then he was surrounded by guests. I went back to my corner, intending to take up my place, but to my astonishment, I found little Bets there, almost lost inside an organdy gown much too large for her.

Bets’ eyes were huge as she whispered, “I’m to tell you they are waiting for you in the kitchen.”

‘They’? I looked around for Tom. He was at the other end of the ballroom, performing a gavotte with one of Ellie’s dancers, most of whom had stayed to join the ball.

So whoever ‘they’ were didn’t seem to include him. I slipped into the dining room and headed for the kitchen. I found Phoebe, her expression stony, standing before the door. She opened it in silence, then shut it crisply behind me, almost catching my hem.

So she was on guard. I surveyed the Christophers and MacIntoshes gathered around the table as Miss Gladiola worked in the background, taking trays of little quiches and baked bits out of the oven. She and Prue arranged them on silver platters for the midnight supper.

At the head of the table sat Carla, her brow furrowed.

There was no place for me to sit down.

Lissa tapped one long nail on the table. “Perdita,” she said. “Tell us about your ghosts.”

I couldn’t quite define her tone, but I felt that honesty must extend to these people as well as to Tom. They loved the house, they loved Tom. And so I told them what I’d seen at the dinner table—and what Tom and I had seen, before Van caught up with us.

As I spoke, I saw little stirrings here and there—Kate shifting her gaze between Lissa and Carla; Paul rubbing his thumb round and round the top of his coffee mug; Jason with his arms crossed, one hand supporting his chin, the fingers tight-gripped on either side of his jaw as if to hold words in. They were the people I’d spoken most to, who had been friendliest—yet now they regarded me with perplexity. Disbelief?

Suspicion?

I faltered at the end, and stared back, a flush of anger making me heady as I comprehended that this was not a planning session. It was an inquisition.

They thought I was lying.

The sense of betrayal hit me like a sword-thrust to the heart, stronger than anything I had ever felt since Mom came into my bedroom to tell me that _Abuelita_ was gone. My eyes stung, but anger kept me from dissolving on the spot as I gazed across the room at Carla. She returned my stare with that head-back, brow-knit, tight mouth of betrayal, but her eyes were not wide with anger. The underlid crimped with wince.

She didn’t want to believe I was lying.

I took a deep breath, and tried to force myself to see me through their eyes. And what I saw was daunting enough—a total stranger who suddenly appears a couple days before the enemy’s deadline, claims to see the ghosts that no one else can, who somehow ends up playing the daughter of the house—and Tom’s dinner partner—effectively singling Tom out far more successfully than Van had been able to.

I let the breath out. “My mother never believed me or my grandmother. So you may as well have it all: my _Abuelita_ said her family was not born on Earth. She said they called themselves the People. Most of them left again when _Abuelita_ was young, but she didn’t choose to go—she had fallen in love, and stayed with him. Maybe she thought they would come back for her when my grandfather was killed, but they didn’t. But she had faith in three things: the Presence, that the People were out there, and that love was the strongest bond in the world.”

My voice wobbled. I gripped my hands tightly, a heartbeat away from marching upstairs to get my things so I could run. As I always had. Always would, for the rest of my life, with only the unheeding revenants as company.

Knowing that I had left my heart, in all the ways that matter, behind, right here.

“I believe you.”

I spun around. There was Tom—he’d entered noiselessly behind me. Of course Phoebe would not prevent him from passing that door.

“I believed her _before_ she knew the foot code,” he said to the others as he stepped forward to stand beside me.

Jason and Kate jumped. Clearly they knew what Tom meant, but of course he'd taught them, too, when they were all young. 

Like a spell had been broken, they all began talking at once. “You really heard them?”  “Can I see them?” “How does that even work?” “Did they talk to you, did they even know you were there?”

Tom just kept shaking his head, saying different versions of, “I don’t know,” and finally, “You should ask Perdita.”

Kate crossed her arms. “I’m sorry, Perdita. It’s just that it looked so bad, you going off with Tom like that. And Van coming right after, as if you’d planned it.”

“After we’ve told you everything,” Lissa added. “When two days ago, nobody had ever heard of you.”

I gulped in air, and when I knew my voice was steady, said, “I get it. I see what it looked like. I am an interloper, and I have no claims on you.”

Tom stilled, about to speak, but Carla forestalled him. “You have a claim now.”

Her voice wasn’t loud, her tone mild, but the atmosphere altered; I was within the circle again. If I wanted to be, Carla’s tone and expression made it plain.

Tom’s steady gaze was almost a plea, and I understood why he didn’t speak. His situation was so desperate, and here I was, the attraction triune, body, mind, and spirit, as great as his need. He would not permit himself to make any move toward me, lest it seem he was taking advantage of the gift I wanted to give.

As yet neither of us had defined the boundaries of that gift.

The last pulse of hurt tightened my throat, and I consciously let it go. “I wish I could give you answers, but it’s so new to me, too.”

Carla let out her own long breath, revealing how tense she had been. She said, “Can you tell us more about your grandmother?”

“She taught me about revenants and ghosts, but only when I was small, before my mother insisted she stop. Gran told me that the People had a lot of talents. There were mysterious ones called Signs and Persuasions, which had something to do with prediction and telepathy, and some could heal with a touch, and then there was lifting—that was the one I wanted. Lifting meant flying, as near as I could tell, and I kept trying to do it. But it was after I jumped off the fence and tweaked my ankle that my mother got angry with _Abuelita_ , and told her to stop telling me lies.”

“She sounds like a real piece of work,” Lissa said in disgust—though five minutes before, she’d all but called me a liar.

 _But this is how we humans knit ourselves back into a circle again_ , I thought. I could almost hear _Abuelita_ ’s voice.

“My mother isn’t a monster,” I said. “She’s a dedicated high school math teacher, back where I was born. It’s just that she refuses to believe anything she can’t see. And she never saw ghosts.”

“If she couldn’t share the bond that you and your grandmother shared, and her own father abandoned her by dying,” Carla said softly, “I can understand the iron yoke of anger she wears. Such a person is to be pitied.”

That finished the subject of my mother, I could see it in their faces, and Paul spoke up. “So is there anything we can do?”

“ _Abuelita_ used to say that the People held Ingatherings—that is, they got together when there was need. That’s what they said, _there’s need_. They’d drop everything and go to the rescue. _Abuelita_ was always like that.” I shook my head, aware of following a tangent, because all those old emotions had been woken. But this was not the time to explore them. “If I remember right, an Ingathering meant they got in a circle, and join their thoughts somehow.”

Kate leaned forward. “You said proximity helps, right?”

“I think so,” I said at the same time Tom was saying, "I wanted to experiment with touch."

“Then let’s try it now.” Kate held out her hands to either side. “Come on. Let’s do it. Since none of us have telepathy, let’s try holding hands. Think about Perdita finding us a ghost, right here in this room.”

Tom’s warm fingers slid through mine, and gripped. I reached down to take Prue’s hand, and Tom held Jason’s.

We stood there looking at one another. Distracted, I realized the storm had passed.

The hurt was back. I said, fighting the old cloud of doubt, “Try to share an emotion . . . a good one. Think about the house. Think about good memories. Or don’t think. Just listen.”

Carla gasped a second before I saw Eleanor Shipley Grahame dash through the kitchen . . . what was that, a musket tucked under her armpit? _Lock up the house, Martha. Don’t let anyone in. Or out. Feed Tatlock’s lad, put him to work if you must, but don’t let him out of your sight_.

_But mistress—you oughtn’t to be out, in your condition—_

Eleanor sighed. _I’m only going to Smith’s Clove. Over the back trail, it’s scarcely a step. Mind you keep that boy here, Martha!_

And they were gone.

Tom's face had blanched. His lips parted, then he breathed, "I saw that."

“I did, too," Carla murmured.

“I didn’t see anything!” Lissa said in disgust.

 Paul rubbed his face. “I think I saw a shadow, or maybe that was the lightning playing tricks on my eyes.”

“Where?  Where?” Prue looked around wildly, her wispy hair flying.

“I didn’t see anything, I was just hoping that Tom would. That’s what I said over and over in my mind.” Kate’s voice rose above the others. “ _IhopeTomseeswhatheneedsto_ , over and over.”

“That’s kind of what I was doing, too,” Paul said.

Tom addressed the others. “I need to get back out there before my absence is noticed, but one last experiment, if you will?”  When the others signified agreement, he said, “Everyone hold hands but us.” He indicated himself and me. “And this time, try to send us . . . oh, your energy and good will.”

They took hands, and this time I could see everyone making an effort—they believed.

The ghostly appearance was nothing dramatic, merely a stout serving woman in her apron taking down the bread box and a hunk of cheese as she talked over her shoulder to someone out of sight, _Bless me! You sit yourself right down, lad!_ This had to be Martha.

When she blinked out, Tom said slowly, “I have an idea. Can you hold it for a while—say, half an hour, maybe more?”

“Whatever it takes,” Kate said, gathering the others’ assent with a confident glance. Oh, to belong like that!

Then Tom’s intent struck me, and I turned to him. “We’re going to Smith’s Clove _right now?_ ”

The look in his eyes, his compressed lips gave me my answer.

I said, “I’ve always wanted to run through the woods at midnight in a ball gown.”

* * *

And so I found myself crossing country side by side with Tom at a stumbling run as the moon rode low over ragged clouds, and all the world was a-drip.

Behind us, the Circle sat in the kitchen, hands held, sending us all their hope.

There was little conversation between Tom and me as we slipped through the orchard on the east side, and down a gentle slope to an ancient lane. Tom watched in all directions. At first I wondered if he was lost, then I recognized that he was looking for ghosts. I was concentrating on keeping my skirts well above the mud, and not tripping over unseen roots.

When we reached the place where our path crossed another old lane, Tom looked around, then beckoned. We eased up under a venerable maple as ten paces away down the other lane Peaceable, limned in moonlight, raised a languid hand. Ghostly shapes resolved into a band of rough-looking men in ill-fitting uniforms, bristling with weapons.

Peaceable said softly, “Braxton?”

A scout came forward. “They be somewheres right near, sorr. Be’m shore on it.”

Peaceable looked around. Though he wore a sword, a dagger, and carried a musket slung over his shoulder, he did not pull a weapon. Instead, he chose a nearby boulder as if selecting the best seat in a drawing room, and perched on it.

Within a couple of seconds, from behind all the trees encircling the clear appeared a group of equally scruffy men, stealthy as the Iroquois from whom they had no doubt learned this tactic. They were all dressed in dark colors, blending them with the deep shadows; Richard was only recognizable by a thin strip of moonlight along a sharp cheekbone between his low-brimmed hat and a knit muffler pulled high. That, and the characteristic saunter to his walk.

“Ah. Richard,” Peaceable said. “I thought we might expect you to come calling.”

“And it appears that I was not to expect you to come calling at my house?”

Peaceable gestured with his hand turned up, one shoulder lifting in a faint shrug. “You must blame your worthy compatriot, Colonel Van Spurter. We have had no rest, and are lamentably short of rations. Mine intent, I need hardly tell you, was merely to hold your excellent house long enough to reprovision ourselves.”

“Before?” Richard said.

“Carrying out my orders.”

“And my orders,” Richard said, “are to stop you.”

Peaceable did not stir from his rock. “We appear to be at an impasse.” He began to turn his head, with a decided air of regret.

Richard half-raised his hand—

And a female voice called out, “Halt right there.”

“The both of you,” came another, higher voice.

And into the clearing from behind a hedge stepped Barbara, tall and imposing in her gray cloak, a musket leveled straight at her brother.

From behind a mossy boulder on the other side drifted a short figure whose shrouding cloak did not completely hide a rounded middle. Moonlight glinted with ruddy highlights in her hair: Eleanor, carrying a pistol.

Barbara motioned with the musket. “Over here, Dick.”

“Barbara,” Richard began in an exasperated tone. “Put that thing down before someone gets hurt.”

“General Sherwood?” Eleanor said. “I trust you will not put my patriotism to the test.”

Peaceable rose to his feet, and executed a perfect bow, as if he were in a formal drawing room at St. James, and not shabby and hungry, with a three days’ growth of beard. “A parley,” he said to the air somewhere between the two groups of silent, tense men.

Nobody spoke, though somewhere at the back of Peaceable’s line someone muttered something about ‘hifalutin fancy gentlemen’ and ‘wimmin’, and from behind one of Richard’s trees came a laugh that was quickly turned into a cough.

Another figure appeared, a stocky man with a cavalry sword clutched in one hand and a horse pistol in the other. “Timothy?” Peaceable said sadly.

This disreputable figure shrugged. “Your orders was to guard her. Had a notion I couldn’t do that without being alongside o’her, if you catch my drift, sir.”

Peaceable sighed, and the four converged a few paces from where Tom and I stood motionless.

Richard said, “Thorne, that gold is blood money. I can’t let you deliver that.”

Peaceable replied, “I am under direct orders, Richard, or I assure you, I would not be here. Not only was I singled out for this honor by the governor, but my Drummond relations with influence in Whitehall appear to have seen fit to recommend me for this task in a manner impossible for me to refuse.”  He turned his head, and his voice softened. “Barbara, I trusted you to stay in St. Catharines.”

“She followed you to Fort Erie, and  . . .” Timothy shrugged.

“I knew if you were heading east you would not be able to resist your old marauding grounds,” Barbara said pleasantly.

“Barbara, this was a capital trick on your part, but it solves nothing,” Richard said, exasperated. “You will not shoot me any more than my dear wife, with whom I shall shortly hold a private discussion, would shoot your prodigiously persistent helpmeet.”

“No,” Barbara said in his exact tone. “But Eleanor and I can, and will, make you look ridiculous all across the valley. Farmer Tatlock apparently saw me searching for you halfwits earlier today. I stopped to saddle up Midnight, you see, suspecting exactly what I see before me. He saw fit to send his bound boy up to Rest-and-be-thankful to ask if I was visiting. So far he hasn’t actually seen me, but he can. And we poor, insipid females can make all _kinds_ of trouble for you, with the greatest of ease.”

Eleanor took over. “Martha, who arrived today to help with my lying-in, and who you know is the biggest gossip in Orange County, is standing guard over that boy as we speak. If we do not return soon, peacefully, then—”

“Spare us.” Richard waved a hand. “I comprehend entirely. Thus we return to our impasse.” He turned to Peaceable.

Eleanor glared from one to the other, and whispered fiercely, “There is no impasse. You two are blockheads. No _, all_ men are blockheads, but most of all the fools in command over you who saw fit to stir up yet more trouble.” She glared at Peaceable. “Do you really want to see the countryside shooting one another?”

“Of course I do not.”

“Richard. Do you really want to give those chests of gold over there on the mules to Sputters— _Sputters!_ —when you know the result will be nothing more nor less than our countrymen shooting one another?”

Richard sighed, casting his eyes skyward.

Peaceable said gently, “Barbara, there is no preventing this much gold from reaching someone’s hands, with the inevitable result. I cannot betray those still loyal to the king.”

Barbara said, “I know. I have had a great deal of time to think as I followed you from Fort Erie. By the way, you do not pay Timothy enough—he is quite remarkably adept at finding comfortable quarters in the most surprising circumstances. But you knew that already. Listen, is it of the first importance to you, not to those lackwits in government. To _you_. To see this gold delivered?”

“I condition only for its use not be put toward arming those who would endanger the loyalists.”

Barbara swung around to her brother. “Dick, what would happen if the gold simply disappears?”

“Then the problem goes away,” Richard said. “But gold doesn’t disappear. It always seems to appear again. Usually under the worst circumstances.”

“Not if you listen to me.”

Peaceable said, “What have you in mind?”

Eleanor nodded at Barbara. “We worked it out between us. Dick, you are going to have to let your men be driven off.”

“But—”

Barbara sighed. “Peaceable has at least twice as many men as you do. Perhaps more. The only reason why you two aren’t banging away with guns and swords right now is because it was you, and not Sputters, who encountered him just now.”

Nobody denied that.

Barbara continued more briskly. “You skirmish as long as you think honor demands, then retreat, and go off to guard Rest-and-be-thankful, because you are sure the dastards will be coming there. But you leave a way up behind the house. You know where I mean.”

“And I, my dear wife?”

“You, my dear husband, take over the old Hopegood house, which you will find  conveniently stocked with turnips, potatoes, greens, some salt pork, and a couple dozen of wine.”

“Except for the wine, those are _our_ stores—” Richard began, and sighed.

“Wine, you say?” Peaceable’s shoulders shook. “Not again, my dear?”

“Yes, again,” Barbara stated firmly. “While I was riding around searching for you, Eleanor spent an hour today prying corks up, inserting sleeping drops, corking the bottles again, and melting wax to seal them.”

“As soon as those men fall asleep, you and Richard bring the gold directly to the house.” Eleanor laughed. “If the four of us contrive it, then the secret remains with us. In the meantime, you, General Sherwood, will return to your men, and waken with them, with hideous heads and the devil’s own thirst on you, after which you may rant and rave about the missing gold. Blame the Indians. Everyone else always does. And you, my darling Dickie, will industriously search from here to New Jerusalem, so that they can get away.”

Peaceable looked up at Richard. “Well?”

In answer, Richard turned away, shouting, “I am adamant—you must surrender or we shall be obliged to attack.”

Peaceable lifted his voice. “This parley is concluded. I shall give you ladies a minute to stand clear, then I very much fear we shall have to resist.”

“You have two minutes to change your direction.” Richard took out a golden timepiece, and opened it ostentatiously—

Lightning flared. When I could see again, the clearing was bare. The moon had vanished behind new clouds.

Tom’s warm hand took firm hold of mine. The wind was rising again, promising another thunder cell; as we began to run, laughing breathlessly, we were guided by intermittent lightning.

At an especially close one, we ducked under the thick canopy of a young oak. The wind had turned chill, and I shivered in my flimsy gown. Tom’s arm slid around me, and unconsciously I fit my shoulder under his arm. It felt so natural, and yet so new; my entire being fluoresced with a profound sense of lightness.

Tom’s other arm closed around me. I locked my hands around his waist, my wrists sliding over the silk of his coat, and I sighed into his lacey cravat as he breathed into my hair, “Is the lifting metaphorical, then? I feel as if we could dance among the treetops.”

“Me, too,” I whispered, “but _Abuelita_ said it was real.”

The word ‘real’ woke us both up to the wider world beyond the two of us.

I could feel him tensing. I probably did myself, as I said, “We know that there was a treasure, and we know that Barbara and Eleanor, at least, intended to hide it at the house.”

“And we saw the four of them smeared with mud, before Sputters caught up with them,” Tom said.

I sighed. “But no hint _where_. Do we start tearing out walls and floors?”

Tom let me go, held out his hand, and we left the shelter of the oak. “My father always jokes about his mail-order logic lessons whenever we were beset by a conundrum.”

“Right. Logic. Barbara did say they’d have something prepared. I don’t think she is the type to tear out walls. And there was that mud on them all.”

“The cellar is the most probable place—but every generation has thought so, beginning with the cell under the stair. The walls and floor of that cell have been dug up at least once every fifty years. I know they’ve looked in other corners. My great-great grandfather had the wine racks redone, ostensibly to replace old wood, but the family legend is that he was treasure-hunting.”

“Under the foundations of the house?”

“Then we are back to Barbara and Eleanor crawling under there to dig? And wouldn’t that be one of the first places anyone would search?”

“True. But a search in those days was bound to be tougher anywhere out of direct sunlight, as they had no electricity.”

“Yes,” Tom said. “Perdita, we are _so close_.” He hesitated, then gave a soft exhalation of laughter, and I knew that the secondary meaning had struck him as it struck me. His focus changed, difficult for me to perceive in the darkness.

Another crack of thunder was followed by warning splats of rain. “Let’s run.”

He took my hand and we skimmed over the ground far more lightly than we’d gone when we first left, laughing with giddy joy; we didn’t slow until the long row of golden lights appeared between the gnarled silhouettes of apple trees.

When we reached the kitchen, the door banged open, and Phoebe was there. “The suit’s been looking all over for you both.”

 Jason was loading more drinks on his tray. “Did it work?”

Tom was about to speak, but then his focus lifted beyond Jason. I turned. There was Van, who raked his angry gaze down us, from rain-spangled hair to muddy shoes. “Tom, you have been avoiding me all night.”

Tom said, “Perdita and I couldn’t resist a romantic moonlit walk through the orchard. "Come along. We’ll get something to drink, and I promise to listen—oh, here comes another storm cell. We were just in time.”

Van’s expression eased, and I surprised myself by the spurt of sympathy I felt: he was clearly deciding there was no mysterious conspiracy at the same time that our mysterious conspiracy was nearing possible success.

But not complete success. That treasure had stayed hidden for two hundred years, and unless we could put together the last of the clues, it could very well remain hidden two hundred more. Either that, or vanish into Van’s dad’s hands as the last splinters of the house were carted off to a landfill.

That horrible image effectively killed my sympathy. Tom had not moved from my side. His foot pressed against mine. The MacTavish code!

LOOK?

The search was up to me.

I smiled. Van took no notice as Tom let go of my hand and they walked off; he finally had Tom’s undivided attention.

The guests danced, laughed, ate, and drank. I was free.

So I walked back to the kitchen, where Kate nearly fell on me. “What happened?”

Everyone crowded around as I told them what we had seen. I ended with Tom’s logic lesson. “So now comes the search.”

Paul snapped his fingers. “Down the old well. Has to be! It was boarded up and bricked over around 1900, but maybe the hole is still under there.”

Lissa shook her head. “Wells? First place anyone would look. Everybody in the valley used to hang their silverware and jewelry down the well at the first sign of trouble. If Van Spurter’s men didn’t check there before they even went into the house, then they were asleep at the wheel.”

“Oven,” Prue said firmly. “The old stone oven is behind there.” She pointed to the vintage iron stove. “They might have fitted it behind the stones?” She stood on her tiptoes and peered behind the stove, then gave us a doubtful look. “Or . . . maybe not.”

Carla leaned against the big porcelain sink, sipping coffee, and shaking her head slowly. “You’d need a jackhammer for that mortar. They didn’t even have any stonemason tools.”

Prue straightened up and wiped her hair back. “Maybe we should make a circle again. Can we watch them carry it in and bury it?”

I said, “It doesn’t seem to work like a moving camera, following the ghosts. We  have to be in exactly the right place, and can see them move in a very limited range. We might see them carry the treasure in, but we’d have to keep moving all over in hopes of seeing where they went next.” 

“In that case, we might be faster searching ourselves.” Kate grimaced. “But it seems to me we’ll just be going over places we’ve already gone over. Not only us, but everybody, for the past two hundred years.”

“So let’s get at it,” Carla stated.

Everyone turned to me. I said doubtfully, “The cellar seems to me the most logical place to begin, for there is the dirt. In the old cell, I mean. And we saw mud on their clothes.”

Lissa yawned, then wiped watery eyes. “Did Tom tell you how many times that cell has been dug up?”

Logic.

“I still want to take a look,” I said, turning toward the cellar. All my instincts drew me there, though logic did not: the rational mind dismissed the cellar as obvious, as having been thoroughly explored, as altogether impossible.

No ghosts appeared to beckon or wave me off as I reached for the flashlight on its hook. Its light was just as unsteady as it had been on my first journey into the cellar, and as I carefully made my way down the narrow steps, I thought about how very much worse it must have been in the old days, with weak, flickering light one’s only source of illumination. Was it possible some corner had been overlooked? Some clue, like that carved daisy, maybe, passed over?

They might not have put in something like the daisy that night. Their job that night was to hide the treasure. But afterward, say, when the hue and cry had died down, might Richard Graham have ordered some clue to be made? It sounded so very like him. . . except why didn’t he pass the secret down, like the daisy that led to the treasure room?

Kate came down the stairs behind me, bringing one of the kitchen lamps. Its golden light threw back the unsteady shadows; when she set the lamp on a box of preserved lemon curd, the shadows stabilized. We both looked around. I played the flashlight on the shelves and shelves of gleaming jars and bottles.

“Behind the shelves?”

“Solid brick,” Kate said. “ _Really_ solid. Nobody wanted bugs getting into the stores.”

“Ugh.” Prue brushed her skinny arms as if bug ghosts had leaped onto her, and ran lightly up the steps.

Thinking of the daisy, I said, “Could there have been a secret compartment among the bricks? Say, behind big barrels or flour bins, or something?”

“In those days, flour was always kept off the pantry, which was drier than the cellar,” Prue said from where she sat on the top stair. Her shadow threw long, extravagant lines down the stairs, shrouding them revealing the grungy old bean pot half-buried in the mossy ground at the edge of the stone flagging of the cellar floor. Beyond that was the hard-packed dirt of the cell.

I began to turn, remembering the bean pot’s history—it had lain undisturbed since the night Peaceable kept Richard in the cell as prisoner.

I turned back. “Who was in charge of the cellar?” I asked.

“The butler,” Kate and Prue said together, and Prue added, “The Christophers had the keys. So nobody got into the wine.”

“The family would have keys, too,” I said, staring down at that half-buried bean pot. “The butler would take pride in his cellar, wouldn’t he? Was there ever any other garbage lying around, do you know?”

“That bean pot isn’t garbage,” Kate said with a note of pride. “It’s _history_. Family history. Nobody ever touched it, on Richard Grahame’s own orders.”

“Granny Gladiola told us, how Richard Grahame taught his sons that it was a reminder, ‘pride goeth before a fall,’ Prue recited, hugging her knees under her chin.

Lissa peered down past Prue. “Richard also had a scrap of tartan with the same legend on it.”

As Lissa spoke, I took one step, and another, toward that pot. Then I bent down to shine the flashlight directly on it. The portion still visible above the ground was caked and encrusted, looking like what it was: a piece of glass that had been sitting undisturbed for two centuries.

My heart beat in my ears as I reached down.

“Ugh. It’s got to be filthy,” Kate said. “We always just sweep around it.”

I scarcely heard her. Barbara and Richard loved their jokes—and Peaceable seemed to appreciate irony. And Eleanor, I would wager anything, would have been an excellent householder, not the type to let her servants leave dirty pots lying about even in the cellar . . .

I looked up at Kate, afraid to say the words—afraid to be wrong.

She gazed back at me, her eyes black in the dim light. “What is it? Ghosts?”

“Do you have any shovels?” I asked.

* * *

Kate ran to get Paul. There were three layers of guards protecting us as we dug, Phoebe serving as gate sentinel, relaying stuff to the actors playing footmen and housemaids. Phoebe had become an insider as well; later I would find out that she was apprenticing to Miss Gladiola.

She was the one who went to get Tom.

He appeared at the top of the stair where Prue had sat holding the flashlight directly above the growing hole. His profile etched against the wall as he sank tiredly onto the top stair. “You wanted me?”

“We’ve been treasure hunting,” I called up.

“Give me a moment to catch my breath, and I’ll take my turn, though Jason can tell you we dug up the cell the summer we . . .” Tom was caught by a huge yawn as he clasped his hands around his knee and leaned against the door frame.

I began to mount the stairs.

Tom’s voice didn’t change, but I intuited the unhappiness he was struggling to hide as he went on, “Paul as well. Kate, you used to hold the light for us, remember? I thought we looked everywhere in that cellar. But it’s as good a place to begin as any . . .”

I had reached him. He blinked at me. “Good heavens, Perdita, you are filthy. Did you fall into that cell?”

I didn’t speak. Instead, I brought my hand out from behind me, and dropped three age-darkened coins into his hand. “Everybody,” I said, “looked everywhere. Except under the bean pot.”

He couldn’t speak, but simply held out his arms. I flung myself into them, laughing and crying. He crushed me against him, and the coins slipped free and bounced down the stairs.

* * *

 

The town guests departed with dawn, and those staying went upstairs to sleep, Van among them. The entire house was quiet, except for us in the kitchen.

Tom sat quietly at one end of the table as everyone aired their opinion on what should come next.

“You’ve got to sit tight, at least until we get Van out of here,” Jason said cheerfully. He was still wearing his butler black, but he’d unbuttoned the shirt halfway, and was using his cravat as a handkerchief.

“Let him find out the hard way—in the papers,” Paul said from where he sat hunched over his coffee. It was he who’d dug those last couple of feet—and then filled in the hole again after we pulled the chests out. Then he'd carefully replaced the bean pot, with everyone looking on and commenting, so that it appeared untouched for two centuries.

“I think you should tell Van. Over breakfast. In front of everybody. I want to see him throw a tantrum,” Kate said.

Phoebe grinned. "I don't know much about old coins, but the gold content alone in each of those has to be worth a _whole_ lot. Add in the age, and the total is going to be _obscene_."

She chuckled.

“Don’t tell Van anything.” Prue looked worried as she set out a fresh pot of tea. “He might do something awful.”

“Like what? Pistols at dawn?” Paul hooted.

“He’s got no legal rights,” Lissa declared with satisfaction, as she poured out a cup of tea. “It’s on Tom’s land, fair and square. _No_ government can claim it, not even ours, as there wasn’t a government in those days. As for the past owners, since it was the next thing to pirate treasure, the Dutch don’t even have a legal leg to stand on, if they try to stick their oar in, two centuries after the fact.”

Phoebe had already brought in coffee for those who preferred it, as well as a plate of hot scones.

As everybody helped themselves, they continued to debate. Everyone but Carla, who sat silently, and me. Tom sat at the head of the kitchen table, smiling gently, listening to everyone but not saying anything.

When they were done, old Miss Zinnia appeared. “Go on off to bed, all of you. Pet and Gladdy and I will see to breakfast for the guests.”

Carla got to her feet. “I’d better check the barn to make sure the boys didn’t sleep in and forget the animals’ breakfast.”

“After all that,” Prue said, rubbing her eyes. “I think I could sleep for a year.”

As the general exodus started for the hall, Tom fell in step beside me. “Need some rest?”

My eyes burned with exhaustion, and my body felt weighed down with fatigue. My skin was gritty from cellar mud (I hated to think what it had done to Miss Peggy’s gown) but I said truthfully, “I’m not sure I could sleep.”

“Van is sure to be up in an hour or so,” Tom observed.

By now I knew when he said the obvious, he was really asking a question, but leaving an out if one didn’t want to answer. “Whatever you do about him isn’t really any of my business.”

“Perdita, you have as much a place in this business as you want. Surely you see that?” He stopped, and looked searchingly into my face.

I wasn’t ready for that rush of warmth that his proximity always caused. I looked down as my hands scrabbled with absent habit for pockets that weren’t there. “Um, what time is it, anyway?” Of course my watch was upstairs, with my own clothes.

Tom let out a long breath, and his chin lifted with an air of decision. “About that watch. Maybe this isn’t a good idea . . .”

He took my hand, grimy as it was, and drew me down the hall. I followed, too tired for question as he took an old-fashioned key from his pocket, and unlocked the library door. “There’s something I think you should see.”

The first glimpse was of rich paneling in a riot of carving, and the subdued gleam of gilt-edged books. Against one wall sat the Chippendale cabinet I remembered catching a glimpse of. It had glass doors; ranged inside, glittering gem-bright, were a dozen beautiful Venetian wine goblets, each a different hue. I knew those.

But Tom wasn’t looking at the cabinet. I turned around, and gasped.

“Richard always said he hated that painting,” Tom said, glancing where my eye had fallen, then turning away again. “But it hung in the dining room until my mother’s day, when we moved it in here. It was when we started the B&B—what’s wrong?”

I stared witlessly up at the lounging young man in the gray and gold suit of an eighteenth century gentleman. “That’s my dad.”

“That’s impossible,” Tom said. “That’s Richard _Grahame._ ” His expression changed from astonishment to laughter, and he stepped back to collapse in a deep wing chair.

I said numbly, “I think. I mean, we don’t have any pictures of him—Mom tore them up when he moved out. And so all I have is memories.” I swung from Tom back to the picture. “But that’s him. That’s he? He’s him?”

Tom was still shaking with silent mirth, his long fingers at his temples as if to hold his head together. Then his hands dropped.  “And here I was afraid you would be thinking I was accusing you, if you saw _that_.” He lifted a hand toward the opposite wall where hung, between two of the bookshelves, a very old painting of a fellow in Cavalier collar and velvets. He wore a heavy signet on one finger, and in his other hand, perfectly rendered, he sported a watch exactly like mine. Except the initials so carefully painted in were _CJG_.

As I stared up at that stylized, somewhat flat face and the nearly Mannerist exactitude of every twist and knot in the lace, I could descry familiar features in the slightly lifted black brows and lazy gray eyes, as Tom said, “That’s Charles James Grahame, first baron. He was the one who started collecting the library later brought here, after the ‘45. His brother, so the family histories say, was happiest riding the Borderlands during the bad old days of cattle lifting and the hot trodd. His name,” Tom finished, “was Richard Enos Grahame. What did you say your father’s name was?”

“Grant Richards.” I sat down, suddenly dizzy. “Do you think . . .”

“That you are a long-lost relative? Very long, and very lost! Everybody keeps saying you look like Barbara, though I think you look like _you_.” He let his breath out.

 “But why . . . maybe Dad never knew. If it’s even true,” I said numbly.

“Mrs. MacIntosh will tell you that nothing is more natural than for soul families to find their way back to one another.” Tom got up and took both my hands. “I feel as if I’ve known you forever, that I can say anything to you. I keep having to remind myself that we met a couple days ago.”

I laughed unsteadily. “Me, too, me too—”

A knock on the door, loud and insistent.

I leaned up to kiss his cheek, the bristles that brushed my lips disarmingly dear. “I’d better go get cleaned up. I’m afraid I ruined your mother’s gown.”

I opened the door and stepped past Van, who was back in his Armani. He gave me a puzzled, brooding look as I excused myself and walked past; behind me I heard Tom say, “Breakfast should be ready soon. Come take a walk with me, Van.”

* * *

The sun shone benignly from a pure, rain-washed sky. The orchard looked scrubbed and fresh, little green apples gleaming. The garden glistened with gem-bright droplets as I walked through the orchard a short time later.

The sounds of laughter and talk drifted from the house on the fragrant breeze. _I have so much to learn_ , I thought as I walked in and out of the dappled sun splashes.

After a warm shower I’d changed into jeans and a summer top, clothes I’d once chosen to make me inconspicuous as I passed along the boundaries of everyone else’s life. The gown I’d surrendered to Kate, who simply nodded, then said, “I wonder if Miss Peggy is going to insist we keep it that way, for adding to the family legend.” She smiled as she carried it off.

Carla had walked outside with me before heading off to the barn. When we were alone, she'd said softly, looking at the ground," When Barbara came to me, she said nice things about my horse. Told me a little about Midnight, and Richard's Gawaine. Then she said to me, _You are a Grahame in all the ways that matter._ I did not mind being a Christopher, then a MacIntosh. Her words were about belonging. So I pass them on to you."

She didn't wait for an answer, but marched off.

I sat on the low orchard fence, watching Carla exercising the horses in the far paddock until I heard the Ferrari’s engine roar up the road.

A short time later, Tom appeared, walking toward me from sun shaft to shadow. His face lifted when he saw me.

“I heard from the others what you did," I said. “By the time I got downstairs everyone was talking.”

Tom’s grin was rueful. “Not everybody is happy. But I think they’ll get used to it.”

“Was Van happy?”

“Dazed is more like it. Angry, amazed, relieved, then happy by turns. His father will probably make noise, because for him, half won't be enough. Nothing is ever enough. All I know is that we have discharged any semblance of moral debt between our ancestors. I just got off the phone with Pat, who agreed with me. In fact, any more coming to him in England and it would go straight to income tax. Pat’s quarter share will take care of the family and Thorne for an appreciable time, which is all he wants.”

“And you? What will your quarter be a means for?” I asked, though I knew, but I wanted the pleasure of hearing him say it.

Tom spread his hands. “The house is safe. We can even give up the tourist trade, except perhaps for those who desire to step out of time, if only in play. You saw that, last night, didn’t you?”

“How much fun everyone had, wearing old fashioned clothes, using old-fashioned manners, and dancing to music played by live musicians, in a room lit by real candles? Oh, yes.”

“We can restore the house, and then host history students. We can fund scholarships. The past can become our living art.”

“Perfect,” I said. “It sounds perfect.”

“And so we come to you and me.” Tom took my hands. “Can you get used to the name Grahame, do you think, even if it turns out your father’s grandfather lifted the watch, or REG is discovered to be Reginald Edwin Gridley from Nova Scotia?”

“We’ve only know one another two days,” I said, though he knew the answer as well as I.

“I knew in two minutes,” he said. “ _Before_ you told me you saw ghosts. The Sherwoods are notorious for proposing on the first day, or soon thereafter. You should hear the stories about the medieval ones, stealing brides right off the ballroom floor and riding hell-for-leather for the border.”

“I'm sure the brides had a hand in the planning,” I said, my joy so fierce that I was a little afraid, because I knew that 'perfect' seldom lasts.

"The advantage," he said as he closed his arms around me, “is this leaves the rest of our lives for courtship.”

Within the warm, strong circle of his arms I shut my eyes, not daring to move, even to breathe, lest the moment end, the spell be broken.

He seemed to sense it, for he murmured into my hair, "You are not accustomed to happiness, are you?"

How to answer that?

But he didn't seem to need an answer. "There is a quotation, I think from Nabokov, that talks about moments like this one, when you stand at the pinnacle of joy. But we mustn't look down, and expect it all to end. Now is when we look outward, because we might just catch that glimpse beyond our mortal limits, and even if we only perceive the mystery, we know the bliss of looking in the right direction."

It was then that I opened my eyes, and dared to look beyond the cicle of his arms toward the wider circle of people I was just beginning to know, and beyond them to the circle of benevolent spirits who watched from the edge of eternity, and beyond them toward the light that _Abuelita_ had said 'passeth all understanding.' _There you are, Abuelita_.

"Yes," I said, and kissed him. "Yes."


End file.
